MS Excel Over the Internet
MS Excel provides many powerful capabilities to model and analyze business
data. All too often however, MS Excel spreadsheets that are useful to one individual
gets used by more and more people, the spreadsheet grows in features and complexity, gets
copied, modified and emailed around. Before you know it, the effort required
to manage the MS Excel application starts to exceed the business benefits.
When you reach the point when your MS Excel spreadsheets are out of control, it
is time to think about migrating your Excel database application to a Microsoft
.NET application. This will provide everyone inside and outside your organization
with highly repeatable business functions that improves the quality and consistency of your business data, avoid
all the control, versioning, and security issues that frequently occur with managing
MS Excel data, and is substantially more efficient
(requires less work!).
Better Data & Improved Ease-of-Use at Lower Cost
Converting your Excel spreadsheets to an MS .NET application provides a far
more repeatable, scalable and secure approach to managing business critical data.
Excel spreadsheets provide infinite flexibility,
but at the cost of unmanageable data. MS .NET applications enable
well-structured, highly constrained data, and a secure, role-based workflow processes.
PCA can migrate your Excel spreadsheets
to an MS .NET application, and make your Excel Application more structured,
while preserving the original functional integrity of the your MS Excel spreadsheet.
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MS Excel
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.NET Application
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Workflow |
None (Email) |
Process-flow defined |
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Concurrent Updates |
No (Single User) |
Yes (Multi-User) |
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Security |
One size fits all: password protected XLS |
Role-based: application, form and field levels |
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Version Issues |
High (file data stamp) |
None |
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Audit-ability |
Low (date and email comparisons) |
High (full audit trail) |
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Data Integrity |
Low (somewhat constrained) |
Highly constrained |
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Data Capacity |
Limited |
Unlimited |
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Data Structures |
Flat: 2-dimensions |
Relational: 3-dimensions |
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MS Excel and .NET Smart Client Highly Compatible
Converting Excel spreadsheets to a .NET Smart Client application does not mean
you have to abandon using MS Excel. To the contrary, once an Excel application has been converted
from a spreadsheet to an MS .NET application,
the data can still be imported, exported, viewed and analyzed in MS Excel! You can use MS Excel templates
to capture and import business data to and from 3rd-party systems e.g. ERP and accounting systems. Workflow,
formulas, and data manipulation become much more well-structured within a
database application that provides for consistent data entry, and generally easier, more straightforward
user interfaces. Best of all, the data can be controlled in a secure way, and made
available through role-based security over the Internet as a .NET Smart-Client
application!
We frequently design .NET Smart-Client applications to import MS Excel data as well.
Using standardized MS Excel templates, we can devise a process to gather
data in MS Excel spreadsheets, import the data into the MS .NET database application,
and make the data automatically available to everyone, with no email!