S/4HANA Cloud Integration | Microsoft Excel

Overview

I have been reading many great blogs this week, but one blog was almost too good to be true.

In Holger Bruchelt ‘s blog, he showed a quick & simple way on how to consume an OData service in Excel in 5 minutes.

It was so cool that I had to immediately test it myself & of course in the S/4HANA Cloud context 😉

Scenario

We want to display our Business Partner data from our S/4HANA Cloud system in Microsoft Excel.

Activate OData Service in S/4HANA Cloud

First of all we need to activate our Business Partner OData API in our S/4HANA Cloud system.

Following steps are required in the S/4HANA Cloud system:

Create communication system & user

• Go to Communication Management
• Communication Systems
• New
• Provide a system ID & system name (can be anything for this scenario, for example “Excel”)
• Create
• Provide a hostname (can be anything for this scenario, for example “Excel”)
• Provide a logical system (can be anything for this scenario, for example “EXCEL”)
• Provide a business system (can be anything for this scenario, for example “Excel”)
• Under User for Inbound Communication press on “+” & “New User”
• Provide user name, description & password
• Save
• Choose your inbound user, then press OK
• Under User for Outbound Communication press on “+”
• As Authentication Method choose “SSL Client Certificate”
• As Certificate Type choose “Default Client Certificate”
• Create

Create communication arrangement

• Go to Communication Management
• Communication Arrangement
• New
• Choose scenario SAP_COM_0008 (Business Partner, Customer and Supplier Integration)
• Create
• Under communication system choose your created communication system
• Disable all outbound services by unticking the service status active flag for each outbound service
• Save
• Note down your OData endpoint (https://my30xxxx-api.s4hana.ondemand.com/sap/opu/odata/sap/API_BUSINESS_PARTNER)

Now the service is ready to be consumed by Excel.

You can perform these steps with any OData API that can read data from the S/4HANA Cloud system (GET operation)

For more details check the API Business Hub for S/4HANA Cloud.

Consume OData Service in Microsoft Excel

Follow the steps in Holger’s blog:

• Open Microsoft Excel
• Under Data –> From Other Sources –> Choose From OData Feed

• As URL type in your OData endpoint + “A_BusinessPartner” to call the business partner entity of the OData service (https://my30xxxx.s4hana.ondemand.com/sap/opu/odata/sap/API_BUSINESS_PARTNER/A_BusinessPartner)
• You can replace “A_BusinessPartner” with any other entity that the service provides, for more information check the API documentation
• When prompted, type in your user & password of your communication user

• Edit your data if required, otherwise press Load

A whole list with all business partners from your S/4HANA Cloud system is displayed.

Also the Refresh button is working, showing new business partners if they have been created in the meantime (You can check this if additional rows in Excel have been loaded).

Conclusion

This list can be very helpful when going into the process integration workshop in your S/4HANA Cloud project when defining field-to-field mapping from S/4HANA Cloud system to another system (and probably many other good use cases).

Thank you Holger for sharing this cool trick.

Many customers, partners and colleagues will benefit from this!

It definitely helped me a lot.

Check it out 🙂