I don’t use SAP, so when a coworker asked me this I had no answer.
Can an Excel file be uploaded into SAP? If so, how is it done?
SAP is one of the biggest and most expensive software packages made in the world. It is used in lots of mega-corps and is highly customizable. Installations of it can take many tens of millions of dollars, huge teams of people, and years of work. There is no way to know what you and your coworker are referring to without lots of further information.
In short, yes you can get data from Excel into SAP somehow or at least a programmer can if it is a one-off upload. There may be something set up to do the type of ad-hoc upload your coworker wants as well. You need to find a business systems analyst that works for your company in that area for that type of question.
SAP is not a single application, so that’s a bit like asking “can you upload an Excel file into Linux?” The answer is yes, for some components of SAP, and the way you do it depends on which component. And I suppose on which aspects of the Excel file you wish to upload, but I would guess that you mean just the values in the cells, so it’s effectively a table?
My coworker is in Sales, and she glazes over whenever I say anything technical to her. She asked me about this because I’m kinda ‘technical’; but as I said, I don’t know anything about SAP. So finding out exactly what she wants to do and why will be difficult. Apparently she provides a monthly report to a client who runs SAP, and she wants to provide another report that comes in Excel format to them; or, the client wants to integrate the Excel report into their system so that they can do whatever with it. I’m not really clear on that. I’ll see if I can get more information next time we’re both in the office.
When I worked for Starwood Hotels, we used SAP for are accounting and financials. I believe it’s called “Business One.”
I thought it was so funny when I started there in 1999, they were still typing all the reports SAP would throw out and put them into Excel. I was on my third day, when I said, “Ah why don’t you just export these to Excel”?
The dirty looks I got. They had been doing it the hard way for so long. And until the time I left in 2003, I was still getting hotels calling me with questions about exporting to Excel
I forget the name of the software, but I was Asst Controller at another hotel and I think the accouting system was made by Sun. Anyway, NO ONE was exporting. They would print these reports and write over them. I said, “Dump them into Excel, then you can make the changes and notes on your computer and send them to me.”
Whenever I hear SAP and Excel, it’s almost always in reference to accounting software
Here’s some info on different accounting systems
And any accouting system made since the late 1990s can be used with Excel very easily.
In my experience, is people don’t bother to do it. Although I will admit, some systems, take an intermediate step. Like going from accounting system -> Crystal Report -> Excel
It’s definitely being used for accounting and financials.
I believe there is an SAP expert this this board but the question as phrased is basically the same thing as asking if you can transfer existing data into Microsoft.
Yeah, I’ll have to try to get more specific information.
SAP Business One is actually separate from regular SAP. It’s a product that they bought and rebranded in an attempt to get into the small business market, for which full-blown SAP ERP is overkill. Not sure how successful that foray was… I don’t think it set the SME world alight.
As has been mentioned, there are several different programs made by the SAP Company, so which one is being used will affect the answer.
Within any one of those programs, how to upload the file will vary depending on its content. For example, spreadsheets are often used to load master data: the users have a list of “every machine in my factory”, this list gets set up in a specific order (and checked to make sure it contains all the data SAP needs in order to create “machines”), and a specially-written program reads it and writes the data into the SAP database; voila, a few minutes (well, or a couple of hours) to do the work it would have taken half a dozen good typists with special training a week or two… and you needed to do all that work on the spreadsheet anyway, to make sure your human typists had the right data.
There are reports where you can ask SAP, for example, “show me how much stock I have of stuff with code ABCD” or “show me how much stock I have of stuff with codes ABCD and YHUT” or " read the first column in [this spreadsheet], which is a list of stuff codes, and then show me how much stock I have of all those codes".
For actual details, your friend’s clients should talk with their company’s User Support Desk, whatever it happens to be called.
Well, I’ve got this: The client wants to import an Excel Scoring report and ‘use it for analysis’ using their SAP system. I told my coworker that she should have the client talk to their IT people, as they’re the ones who know how their system is configured and they would know what needs to be done. As I type this, I’ve received a reply that she has already told them to talk to their IT department and ‘I know SAP will make it work for a fee.’ 
So it’s really on the client. It’s their system. All we do is give them the data. They’re the ones with the resources to use it. I doubt I’ll get any further information from my coworker. We don’t really speak the same language. But if anyone can propose a scenario as to how the client might save an Excel file into SAP so they can do analysis on the data, I’m mildly curious.
Probably the easiest way would be to use a third-party tool like those made by WinShuttle. But this being the world of SAP, I don’t think they come cheap. Another tool is the Legacy Systems Migration Workbench (LSMW) which is included with SAP. I’m not too familiar with it, but AIUI it allows you (a) define the tables and fields you want to update, and how they map to the input data, and (b) run the target transaction in SAP (transaction being SAP-speak for the user interface screens) in a sort of macro-recorder mode, so that LSMW can note what you want to do with the data. Then it takes the input data and uses it to run the transaction repeatedly. This has the advantage that all the data goes through the usual SAP validation and cross-referencing and so forth, which is something SAP takes very, very seriously. It is not going to let you stroll in with some dodgy Excel spreadsheet and just dump it straight into a SAP table.
LSMW means you don’t have to do any SAP coding, but this is still SAP, so it’s not something that a newbie is going to pick up in an afternoon.
Without wishing to complicate anything any further, there is another whole issue that she should be aware of. One of the component systems in the SAP landscape is BW, the data warehouse. If the client really does want this Excel data for *analysis *they may well not want to upload it into the transactional system (the one that does the accounting etc) but into their analysis system, BW, if they’ve implemented it - and a significant chunk of the customer base have these days. That in some ways would be easier to do - they would convert the spreadsheet into a csv file and BW then has a whole heap of tools to upload flat files like that into the data storage for analysis, where it can be happily sliced and diced in the way that Nava describes, and in a hundred others.
As may be obvious, this is a question which has many different answers and it doesn’t sound like your co-worker has the information she needs even to ask the right questions. It’s much more complicated than it appears to be at first.
Ximenean’s point in particular is well made and worth repeating: you really can’t just dump data into the database in an SAP system (well of course, physically you can, but you get the point) it has to go through some levels of validation - it’s one of the key principles of the system and data design.
If their SAP system is running on a mainframe, then they probably already have the IBM Sort package DFSort. And DFSort can read a csv file onto the mainframe. How they then get this mainframe file into their SAP system depends on just how and where they want to “use it for analysis”.