Is there any way for my app to create a document that will need saved and printed without utilizing some external software? Currently I have a spreadsheet that does a bunch of calculations then a button that runs some VBA to export 2 sheets to a PDF, then it saves and prints it. I want to port this spreadsheet into a .NET app.
I have experience with everything EXCEPT this: how do I re-create these 2 documents that are currently in Excel, without having to utilize Excel? My whole goal here is to get out of Excel...because I hate it, and I'd like to send this app to clients across the country. I really don't want to have to tell clients that they need Excel to use this. I might as well just leave it in the spreadsheet if that's the case.
I'm sorry if this is sort of "nooby", but I'm not sure what the best course of action here is. Should I try to mimic my Excel sheets on 2 hidden forms and save/print those? Should I write some HTML to produce these forms in a browser and save/print from there? Are there any other options here? I'll probably end up saving as XPS if I can find a way to get out of Excel. Would love some pointers if you have any ideas. Thanks everyone!
Edit: a little more info...I don't need help with the calculations, or exporting PDF's. I don't need any help regarding Excel or VBA. The workbook has 1 input sheet where users enter data. The results of the calculations appear on 2 other sheets in this workbook. These 2 sheets are currently exported to 1 PDF using VBA, which is then saved and printed using VBA. These spreadsheets are not "spreadsheets" like you may be thinking. They are actually "forms", for lack of a better term, that the user will never edit after running the macro to export them as PDF's. They contain text, pictures, shapes, etc. Excel is merely the medium currently being used to create these documents. My goal is to build this project in .NET and get us out of Excel, but I'm not quite sure how to reproduce these 2 forms within my app without utilizing Office. Think of them as templates. After the user enters data in my app, it will do some calculations, and the results need to appear on 2 forms that need printed and saved on the user's machine. How do I recreate these 2 forms in .NET?
Of ya, vb.net, winforms (although I could use WPF as I haven't started yet), 4.0 framework :)
Here is what you can do:
Add an empty Excel file into your resources and use it as template
When your program is to save data, you can take that file from resources and save it to hard disk.
Connect to Excel file using "Microsoft.Ace.oleDb."
Save and read data in Excel just as it was a db table - there are plenty examples on the net. Google for it.
For this project you don't need Excel application on the machine.
Now, if your concern is Excel, you don't have to worry. Your clients can use OpenOffice, for example. Or, you can save data in CSV format. CSV is not Excel. You can create your own text format and your clients will be able to read it with the Notepad. You can do HTML/XML combination and have your html page load whatever xml you supply.
Seriously, create a spreadsheet and tell your clients that they can open it with their favorite spreadsheet editor.
So instead of using a third party program or anything fancy , you could just read in the excel or xsl file and spit it out? Just write some code to format the data properly for users... There is a similar question that may help you with a tutorial - Here But this is for java, Are you using c# or vb ? .Net 4.5 ? razor ?
You can create the PDF's from code using tools like iTextSharp. Or use fillable PDF templates and use iTextsharp to fill in the form. You will need a program to print the PDF, I use the Foxit Reader. I'm sure there are some full featured PDF tools out there that include printing.
You can also doing printing from VB.Net but I would guess mixed media documents would be difficult.
Related
I began writing a docx document to do a project of mine.
Recently, I realized that it would be easier to manage that data if it was in a database.
So, I wanted to import that data into MS Access automatically, to avoid copying and pasting the data manually.
Is there anyway to do it? I have only encontered ways of opening Word application via Access. I also know that docx has a XML structure, so I imagine if I can open that structure, it would be easy to do a parser in VBA
There are two basic ways information can be taken out of a Word document and put into an Access database: automating the Word object model using VBA code running in either Word or Access OR extracting the WordOpenXML that makes up the Word document. You indicate you lean towards the second option.
Here, again, there are a number of approaches available:
Use VBA in Word or Access to extract the WordOpenXML of the document open in the Word application user interface.
Use VBA in Access together with non-VBA tools to "crack open" the Zip file and extract the XML.
Use the tools available in the .NET Framework to extract the content of the ZIP file and write it to Access using an OLE DB connection.
I understand your goal is to be able to recreate the document at a later point for printing, so you want to preserve all the formatting. In addition, you want to be able to read the content from within Access.
I believe this will require a minimum of four fields in the Access table:
ID
Title
Text of song
The complete WordOpenXML for re-creating the document
You don't mention (4) in the discussion and problem description, but if you want to store the formatting AND you want to be able to read the content I believe this is necessary. While WordOpenXML is "readable", there's a lot of mark-up in there which doesn't make reading comfortable.
All things being equal, I'd go for either VBA working on the open Word document or the .NET approach, using the Open XML SDK (free download .NET library you can reference in Visual Studio and distribute with solutions).
One important thing to keep in mind is storing the Word Open XML in the database. Unless something has changed in Access, you can't store the ZIP file - you need a "streamable" format. That would be the OOXML OPC flat-file format.
When you read the WordOpenXML from a document using VBA, that's what you get, which is why that would be an option for me. The Open XML SDK doesn't have that option, but there is code available from Eric White's blog for doing this.
When you later want to recreate and print the document it should be enough to stream the WordOpenXML to a file with the .xml extension. Or you could convert it back to a docx zip file (same blog).
Using VBA outside of the MS-Office suite of applications, is there a good way to create a PDF document, or another light-weight document that can be converted to a PDF?
I have data within classes, which I want to get into a PDF, how do I do that quickly, without resorting to opening up MS Word, MS Excel, etc?
This link seems like it might be helpful with solving your issue.
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/840511
According to the information there you can print to the adobe pdf virtual printer and it will generate the file. The people on that forum were doing something with emailing the file afterwards and generating the file from access data, but it looks like a solution that will work for any VBA project.
The managing director at our company wants me to produce an automated monthly document that saves to a certain place on our system so that he doesn't have to manually input all of the data. I have set up so that the document can save to the correct place in the correct format but my knowledge of VBA is not great.
Tackling this from a 1 question at a time point of view I suppose my question would be is it possible to create 1 very long macro that will accomplish many different tasks over several workbooks. For example we have a report that comes from our ERP (Baan) and shoves all of the data into one cell. Is it possible to create a macro that will accomplish formatting text to columns, then copy data from a cell based on a row reference and then take said data and paste it in to a different workbook? Would it then be able to save the workbook all from just running one macro and if so how long will all of that take once the macro is executed?
Yes I believe this should be do-able, keeping in mind that the file names + location remain the same (otherwise you'll have to edit each month). Create different Subs/Functions and call them in one main macro.
The easiest way is probably to do it step by step. Record macro's and see whether that already helps you out and if not use google & stackoverflow for help! :)
it is entirely possible - but in my Opinion VBA is not well suited to the task. The editor is atrocius at best and it is easy to produce highly specific "spaghetti code".
File operatione are possible, but are not nice. Error handling is 80s style with lots of goto.
So if you want to build something maintainable, build an external Application using Interop or epplus (.net package for reading /writing to excel documents) or an .net addin for office.
I have an Excel workbook that I want to use as a template. It has several worksheets setup, one that produces the pretty graphs and summarizes the numbers. Sheet 1 needs to be populated with data that is generated by another program. The data comes in a tab delimited file.
Currently the user imports the tab delimited file into a new Workbook, selects all and copies. Then goes to the template and pastes the data into sheet1.
This is a large amount of data, 269 columns and over 135,000 rows. It’s a cumbersome process and the users are not experienced Excel users. All they really want is the pretty graphs.
I would like to add a step after the program that generates the data to programmatically automate the process the user currently must do manually.
Can anyone suggest the best method/programming language that could accomplish this?
POI is the answer. Look at the Apache website. You can use java to read the data and place it in cells. The examples are very easy.
You can can solve this, for example, by a simple VBA macro. Just use the macro recorder to record the steps the user does manually now, this will give you something to start with (you probably will have to add a function to let the user choose the import file).
You said you have some data generated by another program. What kind of program? A program that you have developed by yourself and where you can add the excel-import functionality? Or a third party program with a GUI that cannot be automated easily?
And if you really want to create an external program for this task - choose whatever programming lanuguage you like as long as it can use COM objects. In .NET, you have the option of using VSTO, but I would only suggest that for this task if you have already some experience with that (but than you would not ask this kind of question, I think :-))
Look here:
Create Excel (.XLS and .XLSX) file from C#
There's NPOI (.NET Framework version of POI) so that you can code in C# if you want.
If you use two workbooks - one for data and one for graphs - and don't update links automatically you can use a macro to get the data (maybe an ODBC connection if the file is in a format it can read - long shot) and then link the charts to the data workbook.
Use a macro to update the links and generate the charts and then send them out and hope no one updates the links.
We have built an Excel 2003 template that asks the user to select an XML file which is then imported into an XML Map and used to populate a worksheet.
Unfortunately it turns out that the users have Excel Standard Edition, which does not include the XML import functionality - namely the Workbook.XmlImport function.
Users are able to open the XML file via File -> Open etc, however this opens it up as a new workbook.
Does anyone know of a way to get around this? How can we get the XML data to populate the XML Map when the users have Excel 2003 Standard Edition?
Quick workaround:
Let them select the file to open
open that file into a new workbook using vba,
copy the contents of the new worksheet (or read it all in to vba recordsets to parse)
paste it back into your active worksheet (maybe after you've done stuff to it in VBA)
close the xml worksheet, not saving any changes.
That would get around it, but it won't be quite as flexible. Depends how much you need to do with it.
Any help?
The best course may be to buy a used version of 2003 Professional. You can get one for about $50. If you have a ton of users, this obviously doesn't scale. If you have four users, this would be a $200 fix to your problem.
If you're on the verge of upgrading, you might accelerate that process and make sure the 2007 flavor has XML support. I want to say that all of 2007 has XML, but definitely investigate it before you take my word.
Option 3 involves a lot of time and code. You can write VBA to import and refresh XML (or CSV or something else). Obviously you'd have to weigh the cost of coding to finding and buying enough used licenses.