Alternatives to Excel as a service reporting tool

[wpryan]

Hi All, I hope I am posting this in the right place... My company makes complex medical devices, and for which I developed an Excel based service reporting tool. The service report does a couple of things: it guides the service engineer through exactly has to be done based on the service they are performing and calculates pass/fail criteria for the various tests that have to be done. It is used by direct workers for my company as well as authorized service providers. Generally it's working fine but problems come up from time to time. Sometimes the authorized service partner's IT department doesn't permit the use of Macros in Excel, for fear of ransomware. Regional settings can sometimes be problematic. Some engineers want to use Excel on their tablet, this doesn't work on every tablet Excel installation, and for sure it won't work on an iPad.

I want to look into alternatives to Excel. What I need should be platform independent. To be honest, I am not a programming expert. I learned VBA for Excel and Access on my own, and with an enormous amount of help from this site. I looked briefly at Microsoft PowerApps, thinking it showed promise, but then found out that it will not work with those who are outside your organization and to be honest, we have more persons working on the systems from outside our organization than inside. Additionally, it is not for free. I was thinking about Access redistributable, but don't know if it could be used on tablet computers.

So basically I'm looking for a solution here. Can anyone make suggestions?

 

[Rijnsent]

Hi wpryan,
this sounds to me like your tool has "outgrown" Excel.
If I sum up your criteria:
-has to work on a windows computer and an iPad
-has to work without macros
-has to be free
What comes to my mind is that you probably want something browser based, maybe available offline? You could e.g. look into Google Sheets. Basically browser based but also available offline. It's less prone to the regional settings. You'd have to learn Javascript for the coding, but it offers good options to share files.