MS Excel - Appealing, Structured And Neat Appearance For Ease Of Usage By People With Limited IT Abilities?
Mar 2, 2010
I'm currently working on my (business) master's thesis... the topic is capital budgeting tools to manage major investments for a European energy supplier.So far the company has used MS Excel for calculating relevant data to make decisions on whether to invest money in new projects or abandon them. There usually is a host of input data, lots of basic calculations and just two or three outputs (such as Net Present Value, Return on Investment etc) .It is my task to develop a new excel template or decide on buying a completely new software license, if excel proves unable to provide the functionality the company needs.
So far I have only very limited programming knowledge, stretching to Java basics, some HTML code and SQL Databases.However, a colleague hinted at the fact that the VB.net programming language can be easily learned and used to improve excel considerably. Ideally I would need excel to be able to:
- make sure people putting data into our template don't mess with it
- be able to communicate with a database
- have an appealing, structured and neat appearance for ease of usage by people with limited IT abilities
- provide all output, including sensitivity analysis charts, in a structured, printable overview
I would like to display over 20 items in a listbox under about 10 headings. As you can imagine, with the varying lengths of each cell, this looks pretty messy. For example, if a name is long, it takes both the space under the name heading and the number heading.
How can I avoid that while still use listboxes, and NOT DataGridview! I'm having an awful amount of trouble with Grids!! I would like something simple yet neat.. Can't I have columns or dividers in listboxes?
I created a VB.Net application that will read from excel file and put the data into a table.I used an excel sheet which has 3 columns and 65000 rows.Before starts reading the excel my machine's CPU Usage is around 15%, but during reading the CPU Usage jumps upto 95%.
Private Sub readFromExcel(ByVal fileName As String, ByVal sheetName As String) Dim connString As String = "data source=XE; user=test; password=test" Dim con As New OracleConnection(connString)[code].....
I have the following error for every cell: "the number in this cell is formatted as text or preceded by an apostrophe" To duplicate the error: I have to store this results that come from a Web services as strings array: Sample: (3 by 3 array)
I have a circumstance where I'm popping up a dialog window containing a "Please Wait" message, running an SQL query, then replacing the "Please Wait" message with a DataGridView containing the collected results.The code I'm using for this is basically:
Dim X As New Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand X.CommandText = "SELECT some_data FROM someTable" Dim XAdapter As New System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataAdapter(X)
[code]....
I would like to put the retrieval of this data into a background thread, so that the UI doesn't freeze up while I'm loading larger datasets, but, having done this, I'd also like to allow the user to cancel and close the dialog, if accessing the data takes longer than they want to wait.At the moment, this Dialog window can take some arbitrary SQL string and display the results (using SQLDataAdapter) without any extra code.How can I make this process interruptible, while also retaining the ease of access of the SQLDataAdapter?
How to format by padding left and right. I have two integers, two strings, and another integer that I need to align neatly in columns. There is a total of about 100 columns, and they have to be neatly aligned.
I am trying to add structure (line breaks, paragraphs and code) to the Remarks Tag of XML documentation in VB2005. I have tried many examples from "Recommended XML Tags for Documentation Comments (Visual Basic)" [URL], but all of the examples seem to compile to one continuous line when viewed in the VS2005 Object browser.
I have a pesky (i.e. A.R.) code reviewer where I work that says that Exit Sub is equivalent to the Go To statment in COBOL and is not structured code. I see nothing wrong with the Exit Sub statment as it eliminates messy If statements.
A convenient way to store structured data is to use classes.While classses offer a very good flexibility they have a big drawback that they increases the quantity of disk space
I once was able to insert a Class-Header type XML comment section which structured the describing of a class; I now cannot remember how I did it. I think I either used a snippet or some macro-type character combination that inserted some XML documentation fields which made commenting a class well structured. It may have even been an extension.
I need some input on what I'm doing wrong. What I have so far is an order form program where customers input their information and what they want to buy. Now, what I'm trying to do is take the customer information, store it in an array, write the customer information to a file, and then when I open the order form, it loads the customer information file and automatically fill in a display box on another form with all the customers and the information.I want each customer in a file to be stored on one line. Like so: (Name, address, city, state, zip)
Mike-123 E Dream Rd-Denver-CO-99558 Jane-234 E Code Rd-Seattle-WA-99458
Then when the file is read, to read it, and add each name to a structured array (customers(NumberOfCustomers).Name, customers(NumberOfCustomers).Address, customers(NumberOfCustomers).City, customers(NumberOfCustomers).State, customers(NumberOfCustomers).zip).
After it has all been added to the array, all customers in the file, I want to loop through the array and display each customer on a new line in a listbox, which opens in another form.So far, everything works IF I don't write to a fail. If I store the customers in an array and use a loop to display the customers in the listbox, all is well. However, when writing to a file and trying to read it back into the array is where I've hit a problem. The following code seems to work well, however, it just reads the first line over and over as many times as there are lines in the file, and displays all those using the loop. I just need a way to loop through the lines and store each line into each structured array for each customer, instead of read the first line 12 times over into 12 different places in the array.
I have just installed Visual Basic 2008 Express.Unfortunately, the built-in (offline) help is very limited. For example, such a basic function as IsNumeric() is not found.Is there a way to expand the help in this Express edition?
how to read this file into my structured array. it's a 'quiz generator' program. i have a .dat file with a set of 10 questions, and i need to load it into my structured array:
vb Structure testQuestion <VBFixedString(100)> Public question As String <VBFixedString(30)> Public choiceA As String
We need to put a firewall in between our servers and a couple of clients. To do this we need to limit the number DCOM ports available so that we know what ports to open on the firewall.The question I have is do we need to limit the number of ports on all the machines inside the firewall as well as outside. This would cause an issue as we have lots of machines which would need to be modified.If DCOM has the intelligence to negotiate on port 135 which port is available on both machines which need to communicate, we will only need to modify the 2 machines on the outside of the firewall.
Im working on 'Virtual iPod Touch' project and I'm almost done..but one thing annoying me..im using drag 'n' drop to make lock slider..1 got 1 picturebox with lock arrow and 1 black (transparent/invisible) with allowed dropping...and its all ok but I want only I can slide (move mouse) in area for sliding (see a picture, but I think all of you understand).
I am using a panel control in vb.net (2010) to build a timeline of images. These are very small images (320x180) and I am running into a limit of 240. While the panel does not complain when I add more - it will only scroll to the 240th one.[code]...
I am counting on some of the built-in functionality of the panel in autoscroll mode (being able to bring any of the thumbnails into view), etc. I am certainly not averse to purchasing a third party control for this. I really need to be able to display 1000 or more thumbnails!
I can create a Custom UserControl with simple properties (Integer, String, etc) and have those properties show up in the Property Panel. I can also create a Custom UserControl with properties like Size, Rectangle, etc and the properties will show up as an expandable item in the Property Panel (click on the '+' and the Size expands to Width & Height).
Is it possible to create properties with my own custom structure? e.g. Property 'Message' expands to Text, ForeColor, BackColor, Blink etc. I have tried creating a property that references a simple class or structure with containing the properties representing my custom structure but in the Property Panel the property is greyed out and cannot be expanded or modified.
I was reading an interesting article here and it made an interesting point about the 'case' statement in vb.net vs the 'switch' statement in C#, which I've pasted below:The following Visual Basic Select Case statement can't be represented in C# with a single switch statement:
Dim Condition As Integer = 55 Select Case Condition Case 1, 3 To 5, 10, 12, 14, Is > 50
[code]....
I've always found the switch statement in C#, with dropthrough and consequentrequirements for a break in each case, to be a bit unwieldy. Is there any reason they haven't enhanced the switch command to allow these situations? W
EDIT AFTER CLOSE: I'm surprised this was closed, really. With the number of extension methods and helper classes I've found online for other things, I thought an enhanced 'case' would be a good chance. I somewhat hoped a luminary such as Jon Skeet may have commented on the background reasoning, rather than the individuals below who've obviously thought 'religious debate' as soon as more than one language is mentioned.
I want to create a dial which is basically a circle that I can drag around in a circular motion. Ive looked at using the code in an earlier post which allows you to drag items around a screen but I cant figure out how to confine the movement so it only allows the user to drag this circle around in a circular motion. Any coordinate altering I do just looks snappy.
I have created Installation package and installed in Admin login. When i am logging into limited user i cannot write any files which i was created as Admin user. I want to update the files from limited user account which was created from admin user.
I have a DataGridView in a Winforms application containing a collection of items. Each item has an image and various other details. I know it is possible in WPF, but can you get a tooltip to display an image and a more structured set of details then just plain text?
I'm currently learning VB.net and can confidently connect to databases and return results to comboboxes run stored procedures ect to datagrids, However I'm wanting to find an online tutorial for doing loops with data so for example
I want to display each element on a page in a structured format so as to make a visual representation in seperate entities (labels maybe) of the data like so:
Order number
line 1 (includes item and price in plain text on a page i guess using a label) line 2 (same goes)
Subtotal( )
The results and formulae i can do but it's simply how to split off the data from my dataset and display elements as seperates (also how will i dynamically create the lables as obviously i'm not going to know in advance how many order item rows will return )
Obviously this is not urgent but if anyone could point me at a tutorial or even better a few lines of code that will do this for the microsoft northwind data so i can mess about with it and play.
