Generating Reports from Access and Excel Files?

casals asks: "I'm a computer engineer working at a non-IT company, and there's this thing bothering me: by the end of each job, we have to generate a huge report that's actually a composite of lots of minor reports, each one of them made using a different software. Since the softwares used don't interact at all, we have to input the same information five or six times - not too smart, I guess. The outputs are either Access databases or Excel spreadsheets (some of these reports are just Excel spreadsheets that must be filled with data); so, I was thinking about making an application that could aggregate all the input models and generate all the outputs I need, at once. Any suggestions?" "Here's the thing: it cannot be a web-based application (connectivity is a luxury at the rig), it has to run in a laptop (each employee should have it installed, stand-alone) and it must be able to import images from Excel worksheets. Crystal Reports uses spreadsheets as data sources, but it's not Open Source; I was thinking about using BIRT or JasperReports + POI, but that looks to me like inventing the wheel itself, so I decided to ask before digging into it."

Comments

Text Processing is what you want!

[peripatetic_bum]

Perl or Python would be best.

dayjobmode

[LiquidCoooled]

This is the sort of job visual basic (classic) can be good at.
Interaction with MS objects is simple in this environment and theres plenty of help in the IDE.
It lives on a machine quite nicely and is certainly quick enough since most operations will be at the speed of the apps, excel word or ado for the data.

All very "enterprisey"(-4 years) and works on everything from 95 to now with minimal effort just install office and your app and everything is there.

Write a new extractor for each report required and let it grab data as required and push it into the outputs.

Its macro-macros.

ot: does the .net experience appeal? theres gotta be some VB devs hanging around here - where have you lot started moving to since v6.0 'closed' its doors?

generate from database

[Foofoobar]

Those reports are based on data pulled from a database. Do reporting on data in DB and not the output from singular queries. Save yourself some headache and time.

Keep in Mind...

[rmjohnso]

From your question, I'm not exactly sure what these reports are and what they are ultimately used for. However, if they are used for financial reporting purposes, this is an area that IT and financial auditors are looking at even more closely. Just make sure if you implement a pre-written package (OSS or not) or if you write something yourself, make it easy for an auditor to come in and get comfortable on the realiability of the application and they data flowing through it.