Resource Logic Program Conversion - Microsoft Excel to C#/Winforms Conversion

Program Conversion - Microsoft Excel

Many organizations solve information management problems with improvised solutions. It is quite common to go into a marketing department or other 'orphaned' working group and find a very complicated data managment system implemented entirely in Microsoft Excel or a similar spreadsheet. The term 'orphaned' in this case refers to IT development priorities: while the services of the group may be critical to organization success, programming resources are entirely committed to handling accounting, order entry, and other processes that would shut off revenue immediately were they to stop.

Many of these spreadsheets are pure 'row and column', where the name of the column is on row 1 and the data rows range from 2 onwards. Another style is more like the 'expense report', which cells alternate from labels to variables reading from left to right, and a 'record' takes up a sheet, rather than a row.

We have developed an automation tool that can generate a Windows Forms/C#/SQL Server table maintenance application directly from the row/column spreadsheet special case. There are certain restructions and assumptions. Without further customization, the table is assumed to be all text fields (numeric or date formats are not treated as their respective formats). The tool does not import any data, althought that can be done in a separate step. There is no security setting, although again that can be provided as a customization option. This conversion system does not convert Excel Macros, the implementation of those or other business rules has to be addressed separately.

For users that are running into limits, particularly with shared access or concurrent data entry, this conversion system gives users the ability to share their on-line records and workload with up to five people with the 'free' version of SQL Server Express, and 60 or more users with a SQL Server Standard Edition deployment. This program is easily migrated to any data source that interfaces with ODBC, including, for example: DB2, Oracle, MySQL, and PostGreSQL.

An ASP.NET (web based) version is also available, although this involves more post migration coding modifications.

For those that feel it would be nice to have a 'real' business application rather than a collection of records being maintained in a spreadsheet, please call 210-734-5575 for free initial consultation.

Or, eMail us at Info@ResourceLogic.net