Kind of a rambling question about programming

[10sun]

I used to program back in the late 90s. Always for fun, coming up with new scripts, whatever.

I am a quick learner, in the distant past, I coded in VC++, Basic, Perl, html.

With work, I've been doing a lot more analyst work and I've written quite a few macros in Excel to manipulate databases / whatever. I pretty much started from scratch with Excel only knowing a couple basic functions and now I am writing / implementing custom functions.

I am at the point where some of my work needs to be published the idiots in my company and I do not want to keep the format in Excel because they will most likely screw something up and then I will get a call asking to fix their local copy. Fuck that.

It is basicly a couple of different search strings from a database of various different attributes of our products, mostly for sales / shipping purposes (currently the file is roughly 20,000 rows by 50 columns, just about a million different variables in it... never did that math before kinda cool)

Would it be better to code it in VB or Access or ?
Currently all the data is in an excel spreadsheet.
I do not know VB or Access, but as I stated before I am no slouch and learn pretty quick.

What do you guys think?

[Tikker]

For stuff like that we use Brio Query

that way you can "publish" a front end webpage that they just have to process(click a button) and it'll spit out the results

Brio is basically a powerful graphical SQL query tool (it'll take excel tho!)

it's also expensive, but generally worth it

[10sun]

Our mainframe is already being pushed to the limits, so what I want to do is be able to distribute the finished product to the end users in a file less than 20 megs. Right now the spreadsheet where I keep the data is ~2mb if memory serves.

-Adam

[Tikker]

well

all the data stays where it is

brio sits on your PC and just pulls data from the tables you specify

[10sun]

I'll see what I can see about it tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, anybody else have any opinions / suggestions etc?

-Adam

[Naethyn]

VB.NET can do all that

Make an asp.net webpage that displays info onto a datagrid pulled in through a webservice.

[10sun]

Distributed a version with a VB frontend today. It was rushed, but the Director of Sales was bugging me, so I sla/opped it together. Going to be working on it further to refine some automated features.

I appreciate the input.

The key thing was to make it a single file that could be accessed offline. There is a lot of use for it while people are out of the office and as a quick reference guide.

-Adam