Re: Excel data consolidation question

Nick;

you are such a fucking liar.
they're not blocked in XP SP2.

they're not depecrated in Office 12. Office 12 hasn't shipped yet
fucktard so go screw yourself.

'any web presentation is better hosted on the server'

oh i'm so glad that you are the SINGLE person that has EVERY POSSIBLE
understanding of how it's soooooo inefficient to run things on the
clientside.

I mean; if everything should run on the serverside; why is google and
yahoo and microsoft making powerful clientside AJAX applications?

OWC are the same thing as AJAX for all practical reasons.... a richer
client experience.
there isn't an interface in the world; anywhere-- that can compete with
OWC pivotTables for price, performance, portability and did i mention
PRICE?

your simple server-side pages are for losers.

Aren't you tired of posting back to the webserver a dozen times on
every page?

I personally hate how when you're typing something in windows live
mail; it's talking to the server and trying to auto-complete the name
of the contact that you're typing.

it's like the worst; slowest design EVER.

yeah.. 'everything should run on the server side'

kids.. ***

so uh.. where are flash add-ins going to run then; kid??

-Aaron



Nick Hodge wrote:
Aaron

Three things about OWC

1) They are ActiveX and now blocked by default in WinXP SP2
2) They are deprecated in O12
3) Any web presentation is better hosted on the server (asp, asp.net, php,
etc) and presented in some of the new controls which implement XHTML, etc
which give rich user views, with no security warnings and server security,
without *any* need for client installed controls

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
www.nickhodge.co.uk
nick_hodgeTAKETHISOUT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


<aaron.kempf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1151020671.043977.16220@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Harlan;

So you're going to do this

=COUNT(1/(ABS(YEAR(DateEntry)-1960)<=60))


For each of a trillion different cells.

And then you'll open up each spread*** by hand and if it has a 1 in
there; then you'll know that you've got to change this value by hand?

Are you kidding me??

Re:
Really? Where's the url to download it so anyone can see whether this
claim is BS or not?

it's just functionality that is built into Access.

File, SendTo

if worst comes to worse; you can save your form as a Data Access Page
and then email it around.

I've built quite a few complex 'Excel Replacement' solutions using this
type of technology.

but it looks just like a webpage; it is a simple webpage.
it uses these components called 'office web components'

When I say 'components' think of something similiar to Adobe Acrobat
Reader; or Flash.. all it consists of is a 'Object Tag' in HTML.

and these components are what make Excel completely and utterly
OBSOLETE.

you know when you save a spread*** as HTML and 'add interactivity'?
that is what I am talking about.

It isn't a piece of Excel-- these are primarily components that are
best created using Microsoft Access (or something like dreamweaver for
example).

those are the components that I'm referring to. I use those ALL DAY
LONG; EVERY DAY.
and they provide things like:

a) drilldown - the ability to have a drilldown effect in a pivotTable
b) displaying a field; but keep it collapsed-- so that drilldown is
easy
c) the ability to create custom fields INSIDE the pivotTable (you have
to create custom formulas OUTSIDE of a pivotTable)
d) the ability to have 250,000 rows in a 'spread***'


Here is a basic page to help you to get your feet wet with Access
http://www.bcschools.net/staff/AccessHelp.htm

Here is a starter page that describes some funcitonality that is found
within Data Access Pages
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/CH062526501033.aspx

Information about emailing Data Access Pages
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP030890051033.aspx

you don't need 'Access' on your machine in order to fill out these
forms. All you need is a valid office license (2002 or 2003) and then
one of these products:

a) Access
b) Excel
c) Word
d) Outlook

I think that any of those 4 products counts as a license to use Office
Web Components.

-Aaron




Harlan Grove wrote:
aaron.kempf@xxxxxxxxx wrote...
...
how does the manager import 30 spreadsheets and consolidate numbers out
of all 30 workbooks?

http://www.google.com/groups?selm=hkQVb.2432%24_4.259%40www.newsranger.com

Use the first approach.

C) what happens when someone enters 02042006 instead of 2/4/2006 in a
column?

They get a bunch of #'s rather than a date. If the spread*** is
well-written (so something you couldn't manage), the date could
validated using a formula like

=COUNT(1/(ABS(YEAR(DateEntry)-1960)<=60))

which evaluates to 1 if the year of DateEntry is within 60 years of
1960, so 1900..2020, which seems a reasonable range in 2006. Simple
enough to check narrower, more recent ranges. And using this validation
formula, ad hoc diagnostic messages could be implemented with formulas
like

=IF(ValidDateEntry,"","Invalid date entry in cell
"&CELL("Address",DateEntry))

Excel CHOKES on this simple type of data mismatch

Yes, it would if you were so incompetent not to check all entries. Any
cell can contain any value. That's flexibility, but it comes at a
price: it's up to the person writing the formulas that use user entries
to ensure those entries are valid. If that's different from database,
tough, this is just how spreadsheets work.

D) what happens when Susie; over in marketing-- wants to take vacation
days. She adds a column called 'vacation hours' and emails it to her
boss.
Seems like a perfectly natural thing to do.

If the work*** were protected, she wouldn't be able to insert
anything. At that point she'd need to call he boss to ask how to
include vacation hours. Of course this raises the question whether time
sheets should include anything other than work hours, and if they
should, why wouldn't there already be entries for vacation hours?

Feable effort creating this straw man, but this may be all you can
dream up.

There are better ways-- email someone a form in Access; it gets
converted to a DAP (plain HTML); they enter all their data and
presto-chango-- I am ALREADY DONE.

And if they forward the e-mail to, say, their home e-mail account so
they can fill it out in the evening, would they be able to make entries
to your database from any machine with an internet connection? If so,
what prevents anyone else from feeding garbage into your database?

I have a free solution that is scalable and mulitple people can edit
their own data at the same time.

Really? Where's the url to download it so anyone can see whether this
claim is BS or not?

To the OP: Don't mind Aaron. He's right to suggest that Access may be
better than Excel for this provided you can access the authentication
lists via ODBC. But when it comes to the antispread*** ranting, he's
just angry because he's never been able to figure out how to use them.


.