Is Excel the best?

[ac3100]

I am curious to know if there are any other applications that are better than excel for the enduser for creating analysis tools that comes with incredible flexiblity and provides the maximum amount of relevant information.

I have been creating inventory management tools for several years. My company is in the process of pulling information from several stores nationwide. This will allow us to review individual store perfomance and ID national trends etc.

The information will be captured in SQL. I am proposing the information be digested in excel, partly because I can do just about anything from a programming standpoint and I don't know of anything else that comes close from an end user standpoint.

I am looking for "unbiased opinions" and any other feedback i.e. pros and cons to this question.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Andy

 

[ac3100]

Thanks for all the interesting insight.

Are there any advantages or disavantages in creating the same excel tool in pure visual basic?

Is it hard to mimic all the great things that excel can do in a visual basic tool?

I do not have a lot of experience in VB so I apologize in advance if this is a stupid question.

 

[XL-Dennis]

As we all know there exist many different ways to skin a cat.

Using VB to mimic Excel can be done for some basic stuff but once we move up and look for other things we run into the wall.

VB is a great tool but Excel is simpel the best when it comes to spreadsheet unless we talk about the Linux-plattform and GNumeric

 

[jbell54]

I am curious to know if there are any other applications that are better than excel for the enduser for creating analysis tools that comes with incredible flexiblity and provides the maximum amount of relevant information.

I have been creating inventory management tools for several years. My company is in the process of pulling information from several stores nationwide. This will allow us to review individual store perfomance and ID national trends etc.

The information will be captured in SQL. I am proposing the information be digested in excel, partly because I can do just about anything from a programming standpoint and I don't know of anything else that comes close from an end user standpoint.

I am looking for "unbiased opinions" and any other feedback i.e. pros and cons to this question.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Andy

For the money spent I do not think you will find anything better. While OpenOffice may be free, and it does alot of the functions of Excel I find myself having to return to Excel for a lot of the formating options. I think you really get what you paying for a quailty program.

 

[snowblizz]

Thanks for all the interesting insight.

Are there any advantages or disavantages in creating the same excel tool in pure visual basic?

Is it hard to mimic all the great things that excel can do in a visual basic tool?

I do not have a lot of experience in VB so I apologize in advance if this is a stupid question.

Wouldn't that be sort of like reinventing the wheel to use a worn expression. MS already did the coding to create a spreadsheet tool in VB (which sort of is what Excel is isn't it?).

Do you expect that your users will want to now or in the future do some changes to the application themselves? Then Excel might be "good" from the end-user development point of view. Since it would be a gross derelict of my duties as a scholar not to, I must point out that there are risks involved with that though. End-users do not commonly make good developers initially.

 

[Domski]

For the money spent I do not think you will find anything better. While OpenOffice may be free, and it does alot of the functions of Excel I find myself having to return to Excel for a lot of the formating options. I think you really get what you paying for a quailty program.

You do realise that question was asked 5 years ago!!! Doubt they're still hanging on for a reply

 

[snowblizz]

You do realise that question was asked 5 years ago!!! Doubt they're still hanging on for a reply

And I didn't even reflect on it, I just dutifully read the thread, thought it was an interesting take and replied.

That's what you get for trusting that the poster above you isn't threadomancing.