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Re: Time for something new for Excel?

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On Feb 1, 7:11 am, Tony Gravagno <tony_grava...@nospam.invalid> wrote:
> dawn wrote:
> >I will be evaluating what to do for showing users tables online in a
> >web page along with options for users to turn the same data into an
> >html report, a pdf or download to a spreadsheet. We have only one
> >production implementation of an html report, using Cache' Zen reports.
> >In theory we can turn this into a pdf as well (just a tad bit of setup
> >and also some recoding there). We also have one live spreadsheet
> >download. We are using three different approaches for these and might
> >need to continue to do that, but we are currently generating the data
> >for each separately and with separate specifications, which is not
> >cool for keeping them in synch. At the very least we should use the
> >same query and at best we would not need to regenerate it.
>
> General response directed to everyone:
>
> I think we're getting closer to the question I was trying to ask
> originally.  Can you give an example of the kind of "tables" that you
> need to render?  What are people asking for where Zen, PDF, HTML, and
> spreadsheets seem to be solutions?  Is the request simply for pretty
> reports?  Dynamic reports that can be sorted or grouped?  Intelligent
> reports that allow drilling into detail?  Do they really want
> spreadsheets because they're Excel power users, or might they be
> asking for "Excel" because that's a familiar word.
>
> I'm trying to work out exactly what reporting needs aren't being
> satisfied in this market.  In some cases people ask for Excel and they
> get CSV, which is just one example of where this market falls short.
> The real question is - what do end-users need to do their jobs better,
> and how can we provide it?
>
> Excel, static HTML, and PDF might be solutions, but what are the
> problems that people are describing?  Is "attractive" reporting high
> on the list for the people you talk to?  Are your users more
> interested in different kinds of content?  Are they interested in
> doing other things with the data that you provide?  If so, what
> happens to the data that you provide?  Maybe we can save people some
> time.
>
> T

Tony,

FWIW, for "attractive" reporting with Excel we tend to operate with
"templates" which already have all the smarts in place in terms of
producing graphs, cross tabs, vlookups etc. End user develops & tests
these, and we save a "template" of the sheet, sans data .... we then
"simply" populate some "data sheets" and we are done.

We tend to just pump data in via script from the database, though we
can also "drive things backwards", and let people design spreadsheets
with data loaded directly from either raw data reads, or by calling
specific backend routines (just pass a HTTP reference, including
values for named parameters, and Visage middleware will call whatever
subroutine with passed parameters, or null/defaults for any missing
parameters.

As current versions of Excel also allow http references for loading
spreadsheets, it then also becomes straight forward to "publish" these
base templates so they can be accessed anywhere, without having to do
things like mapping shares

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Re: Time for something new for Excel? Tony Gravagno <tony_gravagno@nospam.invalid> - 2011-01-31 12:11 -0800
  Re: Time for something new for Excel? Mike Preece <michael@preece.net> - 2011-02-02 02:26 -0800
  Re: Time for something new for Excel? Tony Gravagno <tony_gravagno@nospam.invalid> - 2011-02-01 10:29 -0800
  Re: Time for something new for Excel? Ross Ferris <rossf@stamina.com.au> - 2011-01-31 15:54 -0800

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