How To Work with Team System using Excel - Publish and Refresh

This post is the forth post out of seven that builds the Excel Guide. See the first post here

On this post I will talk about the Publish and Refresh functions that are available in the Excel.

These functions are the back bone of using the Excel with the Team System.
The Publish function is used for sending all the changes you made in the Excel to the TFS (Team Foundation Server), which is the server side of the Team System, including new work items you have added.
The Refresh function is used for getting all changes from the TFS.

In order to use the publish function to send your changes click on the “Publish” button.

When publishing the changes to the TFS a check that there are no conflicts will be made first.
In case there are conflicts a window with a list of all conflicts will be shown, you will need to solve each of the conflicts to finish the publish.

In order to use the Refresh function to receive changes click on the “Refresh” button.

Note that when refreshing all changes that were not published will be lost.

Refresh function is working in two modes:

• By query
• By the list of items that are currently in the Excel document

The Refresh mode is set in “Configure List” that will be explained on my next post...