Auto update an excel formula inserted in an email in Outlook

[exl]

I send these kind of mails to intimate people about upcoming meeting, the format I prepare in Excel 2013 and paste it in Outlook 2013 (as a table, not as an image)


Now one of the columns I put as 'Days Remaining' which basically tells the users how many days are there to the review, the image below will show how it looks:

Now the numbers of days remaining will be correct the day I send the mail, but when somebody opens the mail at a later date, it would not sort of show the true number.


Is there a way to auto-update this number inside the Outlook mail, as it works in an Excel Sheet?

 

[s.ridd]

This is an interesting one, and not something I've ever really thought about before.

The editor you use to create an email in Outlook is the WordEditor which, for these purposes, you can think of as a Microsoft Word "lite" document. You therefore have access to the standard function set that you have in Word (SUM, PRODUCT, IF etc) but no date specific ones. You can also add in fields, through which you could derive the numerical representations of the dates that Excel uses and subtract them. Unfortunately, once you send the email the field is lost and becomes static so that is a no go anyway. These are probably the reason I've never thought of it before

Long story short, to the best of my knowledge, without writing some VBA on each of your recipients' machines (assuming they open email with Outlook) this isn't possible. Sorry

Simon

 

[exl]

This is an interesting one, and not something I've ever really thought about before.

The editor you use to create an email in Outlook is the WordEditor which, for these purposes, you can think of as a Microsoft Word "lite" document. You therefore have access to the standard function set that you have in Word (SUM, PRODUCT, IF etc) but no date specific ones. You can also add in fields, through which you could derive the numerical representations of the dates that Excel uses and subtract them. Unfortunately, once you send the email the field is lost and becomes static so that is a no go anyway. These are probably the reason I've never thought of it before

Long story short, to the best of my knowledge, without writing some VBA on each of your recipients' machines (assuming they open email with Outlook) this isn't possible. Sorry

Simon

Thanks Simon for the answers. And yes, I was looking for a non-vba solution to this.

Also the solution I was looking for was only Excel-Outlook installed systems, but carrying out VBA procedures in all the systems is not feasible.

One long shot, but not a full solution is to embed the excel worksheet as object in outlook, with the mail format being RTF not HTML. This way when the user double clicks on the embedded excel sheet, it opens up and updates itself. But otherwise its just an image.

 

[s.ridd]

As you say, it isn't really a full solution as it still requires user input in order for the formula to be updated. I'm not sure I can guide you to a satisfactory resolution, but I will continue to think about it and report back if ​I think of anything