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Actually, I don't care what my clients use...

I provide solutions where they can use whatever it is ... better.

By the way, I teach advanced Excel classes at a college nearby, so please dispense with your stupid prejudice that anyone who disagrees with you hates MS Office. Your example of GM using Sharepoint where a database server should be used is exactly what you described earlier as driving a screw with a hammer.

Most of my clients use MS Office. Most of them use Office 2000. They get tired of the problems associated with keeping data in several disparate spreadsheets:

1. Excel has inherent problems with files across network shares, and occasionally hiccups and refuses to save a file. Sometimes it makes it as far as saving under the temp filename (which is easily recoverable) and sometimes it doesn't (which isn't recoverable). Don't take my word for it - search 'Excel won't save file' on google or one of the Excel forums.

2. Sharing a spreadsheet within Excel turns of many features for that file.


3. Several users have related data stored on several PC's in disparate files, formatted for looks rather than usability.

4. Users will copy the spreadsheet locally, thus disconnecting them from the updated information and producing several 'islands' of data.

I approach this in a few different ways, none of which add any sort of licensing costs for my clients.

My preferred method is to create a data store using MySQL, and loading the data from all of the separate spreadsheets into it. (MySQL is a high-performance client/server database that costs nothing.) Then, with the built-in data access tools in Excel, They build spreadsheets that contain no data themselves, but look it up as needed from the server. Thousands of users can be reading/writing data to the server at once, and all changes apply correctly and in real time. Pivot tables and pivot charts can connect to the database directly as well. The database management is virtually transparent to the user, and once they get used to the query windows (which are identical to the ones in Access), they love it! They can find any information they have access to.

Excel's data access tools can also use other Excel spreadsheets as database tables; the driver comes with Excel by default. This is not as good a solution, as someone has to open the file and add new data to it due to the lack of a database engine, but it is sufficient for reading data.

Excel is only one of the front-ends to apply to a setup like this - I used it as an example to show you how I use Excel for database applications. Storing data in shared spreadsheets is not the best way to go. Period.

My business is making easy-to-use, powerful solutions for my customers, and they are quite happy with my work. They don't care how it works, just that it works. I try to use the most open-ended solution so I can expand it later on without completely re-working it.

You do it your way, I'll do it mine. It's time for me to go out on my boat - have fun sitting in front of your computer in your mom's basement calling everyone who disagrees with you a zealot.

Posted by: Hugh Jass   Posted on: 08/21/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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