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!).

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.

		MS Excel	.NET Application
	Workflow	None (Email)	Process-flow defined
	Concurrent Updates	No (Single User)	Yes (Multi-User)
	Security	One size fits all: password protected XLS	Role-based: application, form and field levels
	Version Issues	High (file data stamp)	None
	Audit-ability	Low (date and email comparisons)	High (full audit trail)
	Data Integrity	Low (somewhat constrained)	Highly constrained
	Data Capacity	Limited	Unlimited
	Data Structures	Flat: 2-dimensions	Relational: 3-dimensions

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!