[AccessD] Access I love it

LOL.  Arthur, this immediately raises the question about why the data doesn't reside in a database 
to start with and push to Excel to display it.  Directory structures?  Years, months?  How about a 
table?

I understand that this is what you started with but that is not a reason per se to leave it that way.

My very first job as an Access developer was to build an application that used about 500 
spreadsheets that contained rates for various size ads in newspapers.  The old application stored 
the spreadsheets in a directory tree (sound familiar).  My app imported all of the sheets into 
access and used it from there.

I am not disputing that Excel is capable programmatically, rather that the data might be better 
contained in a database table.  Set up a template spreadsheet, then export that to Excel for viewing 
/ what ifs.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com


Arthur Fuller wrote:
> After some experience programming Excel and Word applications, I tend to
> think that they are being sold short in this thread. Example, I wrote an
> Excel app that is run once a month. It opens approximately 200 workbooks,
> two per investment fund, and grabs the monthly data for last year and this
> year, creating a new workbook containing one page per fund. Due to the
> directory structure (a directory per year and within that a directory per
> month), The app had to be smart enough to increment the year, come December,
> and when incrementing December, realize that the next month was January.
> There were also some calculations and a couple of charts. Formerly this job
> was done by hand, the way an experience user would do it (lots of open, copy
> and paste) took approximately two person-weeks. My finished app reduced the
> task to a couple of mouse-clicks and five minutes. I learned a lot about the
> Excel object model and the power of VBA code within Excel. That gig gave me
> a whole new respect for Excel.
> Arthur