I have an excel sheet I've received from someone with information about their personal library recently, and they've asked me to add the library of congress number to every book on the sheet. There's thousands of books on this thing, and it would take forever to search the library of congress website and copy-paste everything on here. Is there a built-in function or a way to have a column search the website for each book and copy the appropriate number?
Err... No.
This specific functionality (searching the library of congress) is so specific, that it makes no sense for Microsoft to add it to Excel. There would be probably 3 people in total that would EVER use it.
A more generic functionality (take an arbitrary webpage and look for some arbitrary information in it) would on the other hand be too vague. Either it would be useless or it would need to have a bazillion parameters to get it to do what you need to. And you'd need to spend months trying to configure it just right.
Actually, Excel does kinda offer this generic functionality - it's called the VBA. You can write custom programs there that can do pretty much anything under the sun. The downside - it's programming. If you know what you're doing, you can probably get it done in a couple of days, maybe a week. If you don't know... good luck. You'll need it!
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This question is about process / approach, more so than how to write the code itself. I'm a process learner, so this is the part that's creating personal anxiety for me.
I am very much a beginner, and still learning about importing libraries and the like. I have an idea for what I'd like to be able to do, for a Capstone Project, as I learn, however.
I have a spreadsheet that I use each Sprint as par of our Capacity Planning process. I want to use Python to query target tickets in our client's GitHub (while logged in) account, and our Jira account, to pull specific data into the cells that I currently populate manually. Others have expressed interest in seeing what I come up with, as they use the same Google sheets template similarly.
From Sheets for Developers > API v4, through trial and error, I should be able to figure out how to generally import data into Google Sheets. Likewise, this GoTrained Python Tutorial looks like it has an approach for obtaining information from GitHub API. I'm fairly certain that I can find similar for Jira (though the first site that I tried wanted to use a fake "captcha" script to trick me into accepting notifications from the site, which was a red flag, to me).
But which are the quality, most efficient approaches? Especially for a starting out Python beginner, like myself? The last time I coded was 15-20 years ago, using LPC to build rooms/mobs/objects on a MU*, accessed via Telnet protocol.
I need to learn more about how to set up the program, and which libraries might be useful; and the best way - after decomposition - to identify the components and which methods to use, generally, in solving for the project goal:
import select field data from Jira and GitHub to a Sheet, using Python
how do I know which libraries are best to import, like Tkinter, for functions that I will need (this one came up in search for creating dropdown lists in Python, so that the Repo names can be standardized).
seeing lots of references to REST-api, but we haven't talked about that in course yet
what are some quality resources to learn more about principles that I should understand better before attempting this project?
w3schools.com is on my radar, but it is also extensive -- not sure if there are resources honed in on this type of "challenge"
I have an Excel sheet with over 5.000 company names. I would like to add the corresponding URL of the company's website to these names, but this would be slightly inconvenient to do manually. Would anyone have any idea how this could be done automatically? It might be important to note that I have little to no programming experience. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
If you already have a database of the associated URLs it'd be easy to write a script. Hell, if you have the right GUI and they're in the same order, you could copy/paste.
But if you're asking what I think you're asking that's quite a task and I'm not sure you'll find the answer here unless you're willing to post specifics.
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 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