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.
Related
I've been asked to create a macro to update a few hundred or so Visio drawings, and keep them updated.
The update involves putting all objects of a certain type on their own layer - simple.
Now, this is easy enough to do, but when a user adds a new object some time in the future it will likely be on a default layer. So I had hoped to be able to include a VBA macro which is triggered by the Save event to re-assign objects to their layers.
The problem here is that I'd need to include this macro in every document since Visio doesn't have an application level VBA project.
Is there any way to introduce a VBA project to ALL Visio documents using code (VBA or otherwise)?? Or is there an alternative I might not have considered? Unfortunately an Add-in is not really an option due to available resources.
You have a couple options here:
Force every user to allow programmatic access to the VBA project for their documents, and use VBA automation to add code. This works nicely when you have programmatic access, but this can be difficult to assure.
If you're not using Visio 2013, you can actually save a document as VDX (xml) and replace the data for the VBA project with your own (you'd save out a document as VDX manually, and copy out the chunk of data for the VBA project). As I said, this wouldn't work with Visio 2013 since they seem to have eliminated the VDX format. You probably can get away with something similar with the VSDX XML format for 2013.
You can 'migrate' everyone's documents to a new VST file you provide. This would just involve copying and pasting all the content from a document into the new document that has your code in it. You have to be careful though to make sure all the document- and page-level data comes along, too (meaning DocumentSheet and PageSheet and any Document XML properties that may be important, and attributes like Author, Description, etc...)
Item 1 is the easiest, aside from the pain getting programmatic access to VBA Projects, unless you can have people send you documents to migrate.
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.
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.
I am looking for any tips or resources on importing from excel into a SQL database, but specifically when the information is NOT in column and row format.
I am currently doing some pre-development work for a project, and in most ways I would like to use SSIS for the project. The one area that my research and googling is leaving a big question mark over is the import of the excel sheet.
In short our users are using excel as a simple calculator / application. Values are entered into specific cells in the sheet and then in other cells formulas come up with the final answers. The sheet has been "beautified" to make it easier for users to use (i.e. white space, merged cells, pretty colours, etc). I need a mechanism to get both the raw values and the final answers and import them into a SQL database.
There is a ton of information on the trials and tribulations of importing column and row info into Excel, but have any fellow stack-overflowers had experience with this? Is SSIS appropriate for this (the other viable option would have to be integration into a .NET service).
Thanks!
What about adding a sheet to the workbook that pulls the answers from the calculation sheet and shows them in a tabular format, and then use the magic of SSIS to suck in the values from that new sheet?
If you can't modify the worksheet, you might want to look into Interop services or something where you can specify the exact cells you want to pull data from.
I'd try the first route if possible, though another option might be to simply recreate their Excel calculator as a .NET app...
A SSIS Excel data source uses worksheet or range -- think table with column names. You could also consider using VBA from within Excel to push data into your DB.
SpreadsheetGear for .NET will let you load an Excel workbook, put values in cells, calculate, get results as raw values or formatted text and more. This might be your best option if the data is not suitable for SSIS - but it will require that you use .NET (C#, VB or any .NET language) to automate your process. The advantage of SpreadsheetGear is that you then have a solution which does not depend on anything other than .NET (of course it depends on SpreadsheetGear, but SpreadsheetGear can be deployed royalty free with your application using xcopy deployment or any other deployment method).
You can see live samples here and download the free trial here.
Disclaimer: I own SpreadsheetGear LLC