Tony Gravagno wrote:
Mark Johnson wrote:
Tony:
What's the fastest path for someone who's been providing
the CSV's for the last 10 years and wants to deliver
something more complete. I don't want to spend a lot of
my client's money on packages.
When I originally offered the NebulAnalysis package it was only about $600
per server, which would satisfy the needs of an entire office. As it is
today your time=money cost is going to be a lot higher than that no matter
what DIY solution you choose. I only mention this because in retrospect it
seems everyone assumes a package is going to cost a fortune so they don't
even bother to ask about price. But onward we go...
The fastest path for someone who doesn't know how to code with Excel, IMO,
is to create a nice looking Excel document, then Save-As XML. That XML is
now a document template. Break it up into header, detail, and footer
sections, and replace any data with unique text like place marker. In
BASIC, read the header and use it as a base for a new document. Loop on
the detail template, populating it with live data and adding it to the XML
stream. When done, add the the footer and write the doc. You can kick off
a process to open Excel, read the XML, then Save-As an Excel XLS file.
This final file is what your users would use.
If I were to write a new one-off Excel integration routine, I might take
that approach because it's easy for almost anyone to admininster and
extend. It allows end-users or a qualified IT person to create a nice
Excel document in a comfortable WYSIWYG manner. The MV side is just
filling in the blanks without any understanding that it's creating an XML
or Excel document. In fact this is good OOP, Model-View-Controller (MVC)
form, separating the UI from the rules, and the output could just as well
be a web page, Web Service, or any other medium.
For someone who does know how to code with VB, VBA, or a .NET language, the
best approach (maybe fastest too, depending...) would be to write an Excel
add-in for templates created by users like this, to extract data directly
from databases and/or run programs to generate such data. The sheets would
be populated without reformatting into XML or writing BASIC code to do
string manipulation. This is the approach I personally would take for a
real project or a new product. (Inquiries welcome of course.)
The new Office 12 will allow us much better access into the internals of
Excel and other apps, so the above methods are good and stable for the
foreseeable future.
So those are the fastest solutions depending on one's experience. The
right solutions involve learning the tools of the trade and keeping up with
technology rather than to try to get away with doing as little as possible
and using 10 year old methods to satisfy the needs of modern end-users.
The more end-users see Pick people using ancient methods, the less faith
they have in our abilities. Their new solution will be to go pay someone
premium buck to do things right rather than waiting for their MV guys to do
it on the cheap. As proof of this, I have a client right now who (no
kidding) has a $300K budget to make major changes to their MV app, but if
they can't get that done they have a $1Millon budget to re-write using MS
technologies. Personally I think we Pickies should be doing things the
right way, and charge fair market value in the first place. In the end,
everyone wins.
The assumption is that the users are using Excel. I've
taken some other advice on this forum to generate HTML
which has had some success but is limited in ease of
adding fields or making changes. Perhaps this is my
opportunity to get into XML.
Thanks
Mark Johnson
XML does afford some more versatility than HTML. Check it out and make
your own decisions from there.
HTH
TG@ removethisNebula-RnD.com
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If perl is an option, you may want to look into the spreadsheet module
on cpan (
http://search.cpan.org/~jmcnamara/Spreadsheet-WriteExcel-2.15/lib/Spreadsheet/WriteExcel.pm
)
After your pick process (or whatever) creates a csv file, run a perl
script to use that file as input to create an *.xls file. If you have a
little knowledge of perl, you can be up an running in under a day
creating basic scripts.
John
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