Excel solver is amazing and wondering if its possible to incorporate the Solver functionality into a web based app instead of keeping everything in Excel. My guess is no because solver solutions are cell based.
On second thought, there is probably a similar solver available with python.
It is possible, but extremely far fetched. You would have to set up Excel on the web server, which makes crazy things to the licensing. Once there, you will have to run Excel in a separate process, but control it from your web app. Using interop in .net might be the least stupid way of doing this.
So just a couple of links to point you in the right direction:
https://www.solver.com/frontline-systems-releases-next-generation-solver-add-in-optimization-excel-online-and-excel-2016
The last few paragraphs point out that you can use the solver with RASOn, JSON C++, R, Python etc in your own apps so that is an option for you.
https://www.solver.com/
Is the homepage of the company that provides the Solver, and access to the more powerful version that exceeds the built-in version in Excel - good though that is. I have not needed the larger version - just turned a model or two around to reduce the computing needs.
Related
I am given a huge excel file with a great deal of data and formulas and I need to access the functionality implemented therein to create a web service running on MacOSX. I tried at first to use POI to access its functionality from Java but unfortunately POI does not support some functions like MINVERSE, TRANSPOSE, MMULT and others and I found it particularly difficult to implement them (also see this question).
Is there a programmatic way to access the excel sheet? I found RCOMClient for R but it seems it works onl on Windows. Perl, Python, R, Octave, C++, Java or anything if fine provided that it provided full functionality over Excel formulas.
Python Excel: Why Python Excel in NOT an option for my problem. In the tutorial it is written that:
A relative reference is useful only if you have external knowledge of
what cells can be used as the origin. Many formulas found in Excel
files include function calls and multiple references and are not
useful, and can be too hard to evaluate. A full calculation engine is
not included in xlrd.
Unfortunately I need a very good support of the Excel engine.
Sure you can.
Have you checked the wonderful Python Excel project ?
Even better : you could take a look at that stupendous blog post.
Have fun and keep us posted if you need more help.
Don't bother accessing Excel from another language than Python, as Python is where you'll waste the lower amount of time.
I have a friend that is working on a company without any real IT people, and they've gone the classical corporate route of stringing things together with Excel macros whenever they need something. I was trying to figure out what alternatives are available for someone that isn't a programmer by trade.
What is an easy alternative to Excel when you want to distribute data offline together with forms for manipulating it, that doesn't have a steep learning curve? I was going to suggest he learn Python and SQL-lite, but I'm hoping StackOverflow can come up with a wiser answer.
Honestly, for non developers (and if you do not have a dev staff in-house) there really isn't anything wrong with Excel.
That being said, Lightswitch is a new and fairly interesting option for basic forms over data work (although it's still a bit green).
IMO once you go down the route of languages like Python, etc. you're really looking at someone who is going to have to be a programmer (and they may be shooting themselves in the foot on a regular basis).
In that type of environment users end up with Excel or Access to manipulate data. Excel is convenient where cells in row are calculated the same way, but with exceptional cases. Access is better for calculating over multiple rows easily, data management forms (yes Excel can do it too, but Access is easier) and formatted reports.
The best situation I've arrived at in this type of environment is standing up read only "data warehouse" that Excel and Access users can link or download data from to manipulate on their own. For this situation SQL Server is probably the right choice and I use quotes around "data warehouse" because I don't mean it in the technical sense, but rather just a convenient repository. That way you have one definitive system of record. Then any report generated in either tool repeatedly becomes a candidate for incorporation into that warehouse.
I ve heard things like you cannot manipulate tables in C# but can through VBA.
Does any one know what can be done via VBA which cannot be done via C# PIA?
One thing I remember while working on a Excel addin was that the OnAction method of pictures/shapes added on a worksheet will not call into the C# addin which seems like a limitation. You can set the OnAction to a VBA macro only.
This might not be directly related to your question on the differences in C# and VBA but it just crossed my mind when I saw the questions.
Fundamentally, there is no real difference. You can do pretty much anything in either environment, especially if you're talking about VB.net and C# - they are more or less different syntaxes that target the same libraries and platforms.
There are some syntactical differences where certain features of one language do not have direct equivalents in the other, but as long as you have a few basic elements you can write code to achieve the same ends in both.
In some programs you can use VB script (which is a variant of VB) for macros, and in those cases C# can't be used as a direct replacement. But that is a limitation of the host programs, not of VB/C# per se.
edit:
You've changed the question completely now, so this answer is probably no longer relevant.
You cannot debug a problem as it happens on a user's PC with C# because you will not have Visual Studio installed there. With Excel VBA, you can debug from any PC you run the code on.
EDIT (response to Anonymous' comment)
Whilst you can remotely debug this is not the same, as far as I understand. It requires at least the firewall to be opened up to permit the debug traffic (will likely require some major signoff in big corporates) and you cannot debug and repair an ongoing user problem as it happens. Obviously this can't be done with most programming environments, but it was one of VBA's strengths - well, depending on your point of view, I suppose.
i think the most important difference from a business perspective is that with C# you no longer have as many "non programmers" lob managers, etc that can produce code (macros).
The process is inherently more formalised.
In terms of syntax there are lots of differences... but none that are really an issue in terms of the ability to make use of the object model.
Sometimes you will find C# requires a few more lines of code, but in others less. Also you will find that alot of the times where you were required to use System API calls are now redundant.
I have an old Excel 4 macro that I use to run monthly invoices. It is about 3000 lines and has many Excel 5 Dialog Box sheets (for dialog boxes). I would like to know what the easiest way would be to change it into VBA and if it is worth it. Also, if once I have converted it to VBA, how to create a standalone application out of it?
I have attempted this before and in the end you do need to rewrite it as Biri has said.
I did quite a bit of this work when our company was upgrading from Windows NT to Windows XP. I often found that it is easier not to look at the old code at all and start again from scratch. You can spend so much time trying to work out what the Excel 4 did especially around the "strange" dialog box notation. In the end if you know what the inputs are and the outputs then it often more time effective and cleaner to rewrite.
Whether to use VBA or not is in some ways another question but VBA is rather powerful and extensible so although I would rather use other tools like .NET in many circumstances it works well and is easy to deploy.
In terms of is it worth it? If you could say that you were never ever going to need to change your Excel 4 macro again then maybe not. But in Business there is always something that changes eg tax rates, especially end of year things. Given how hard it is to find somone to support Excel 4 and even find documentation on it I would say it is risky not to move to VBA but that is something to balance up.
(Disclaimer: I develop the Excel-DNA library)
Instead of moving the macro to VBA, which uses a COM automation object model that differs from the Excel macro language, rather move it to VB.NET (or C#) running with the Excel-DNA library.
Excel-DNA allows you to use the C API, which mirrors the macro language very closely. For every macro command, like your dialogs, there is a C API function that takes the same parameters. For example, the equivalent of DIALOG.BOX would be xlfDialogBox - there is some discussion and example in this thread: http://groups.google.com/group/exceldna/browse_thread/thread/53a8253269fdf0a5.
One big advantage of this move is that you can then gradually change parts of your code to use the COM automation interface - Excel-DNA allows you to mix and match the COM interfaces and C API.
AFAIK there is no possibility to somehow convert it. You have to basically rewrite in in VBA.
If you have converted to VBA, you cannot run as a standalone application. As VBA states Visual Basic for Application, it is living inside an application (Word, Excel, Scala, whatever).
You have to learn a standard language (not a macro-language) to create standalone applications. But you have to learn much more than the language itself. You have to learn different techniques, for example database handling instead of Excel sheet handling, printing instead of Excel printing, and so on. So basically you will lose a lot of function which is evident if you use Excel.
Here is a good artikel about this topic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa192490.aspx
You can download VB2008-Express for free at: http://www.microsoft.com/express/default.aspx
Any good recommendations for a platform agnostic (i.e. Javascript) grid control/plugin that will accept pasted Excel data and can emit Excel-compliant clipboard data during a Copy?
I believe Excel data is formatted as CSV during "normal" clipboard operations.
dhtmlxGrid looks promising, but the online demo's don't actually copy contents to my clipboard!
I'm currently using dhtmlxGrid and we have the Excel copy/paste functionality working. dhtmlXGrid is the most full featured javascript grid package that I've found.
On their website, dhtmlXGrid claims to support Clipboard functionality in the Professional version. (However, I noticed the Sample on their site isn't working on my Firefox. EDIT: It's probably the permissions issue that Nathan mentioned.)
In any case, we had to do some extra work to get the exact Excel copy and paste functionality we wanted. We essentially had to override some of their functionality to get the desired behavior. Their support was pretty good in helping us come up with a solution.
So to answer your question, you should be able to get them to support copy and paste if you purchase the Professional version. I'm just warning you that it may take some additional work to fine tune that behavior.
Overall, I'm happy with dhtmlXGrid. We use a lot of their features. Their support is pretty good. They usually take one day to respond since they are in Europe (I think). And Javascript is by its very nature open source so I can always dive in when I need to.
Not an answer, but a warning: my company bought the 2007 Infragistics ASP.NET controls just for the Grid, and we regret that choice.
The quality of API is horrible (in our opinion at least), making it very hard to program against the grid (for example, inconsistent naming conventions, but this is just an inconvenience, we have complaints about the object model as well).
So I can't say that I know of a better option, I just know I will give a try to something else before paying for Infragistics products again (and the email support we got was horrible as well).
I was wrestling with this problem several years ago (2004 I think). We ran into the problem that Firefox doesn't allow scripts to read the clipboard by default (but you can grant access to the clipboard).
There's other ways of reading the clipboard data as well...Flash, for instance, can read the clipboard. There's a good article on ajaxian to explain how do to this behind the scenes.
In the end, we couldn't find a web-based Grid that fit the bill, so we had to create our own in a mixture of Actionscript and Javascript.
I'd hate to be Captain Obvious here...but what about a plain old .NET Gridview control? You can copy Excel data into it and out of it...and you can run it on any system with the .NET platform installed.
http://dhtmlx.com/dhxdocs/doku.php?id=dhtmlxgrid:clipboard_operations