Need help selecting language for project
 

Hi everyone,

Here at my company, many people track their parts inventory lists via microsoft excel spreadsheets. Sometimes when one person sells some machinery, they will send their updated copy of the spreadsheet to another person, who must read the sheet and append changes to their spreadsheet.

What I would like to do is write a program to take the two spreadsheets, study the differences, and then merge the two as one new file. The program will need to be smart enough to that new products and put them in to the new spreadsheet.

I want to know which programming/scripting language would allow me to perform this task easily. I am particularly looking for these criteria:

1: All our work computers run on either Windows 2000 or Windows XP. I will need something that will work out of the box on these machines. (No need to install additional things)

2: It must be an easy language to develop in, and to see results fast. I'm leaning to C# right now, because it is easy to build a GUI quickly.

Any other sugestions or ideas on how I would build the program, and what language to use?

Thanks

The macro language for Office is VBA.

Ok, thanks :)

If you are actually going to develop a program, I would ditch the excel spreadsheets and move to a database, but your looking at a lot more work. C# would also probably be a good choice for creating the program. As Dawei said, VBA and macros will do the job. Don't know a whole lot about em', but it would definetly be faster in development. Easier too.

DaWei is pretty wise bulio, I'd maybe ask him with some more info and see what he suggest, he always seemed to be very helpful and more knowledge than most people I've ever known to speak of code... so that would be my advice.

My vote in the situation described would also be VBA. I've implemented several 'automated' applications in it recently and it's really pretty easy. Lots of good books available with clear examples.

Tom

Here is a link to a tutorial I found on VBA. It might be helpful: http://www.functionx.com/excel/

VBA can be pretty horrible to use - but it would be the shortest distance from what you've got to (something like) what you want. If you want a good solution that will work well and last a long time, I'd say go with the option of using a database. That way everyone can share a central data repository instead of passing around independently edited documents and trying to merge changes, which is notoriously difficult to do well at the best of times. Although this does fall foul of your requirement not to add any additional software, the software you add could easily all be free (I'm thinking Apache and MySQL; these will run on your Win32 boxes very happily and you wouldn't need any more than a spare desktop PC to run the server really). You could even just use MSDE - I suspect I'm right in thinking to 2Gb database size restriction wouldn't cause a problem any time soon :) The advantages of moving to a central database are incalculable. It is a bit more work, but maintenance of busy Excel spreadsheets is like water torture so it would pay off in the long run.

Start Date: 08-25-2006, 10:35 AM
Mackenga's Response Date: 06-08-2007, 12:40 PM

Come on now Mack, do you think that after all this time he is still waiting? Sorry, just pointing this out cause I thought there was something here and your post made me re-read this entire thread.

Re: Need help selecting language for project
 

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