We have Sharepoint at my org, and a department needed to be able to edit 1(one) field in an excel worksheet to perform calculations on other fields and print the full results (using Excel on workstation without paying office licenses on many workstations).
They called me for a solution and of course needed one in 3 days. These calcs (in the spreadsheet) had already been through a stringent review process and since we had Excel services for MOSS 2007, we thought all is well. Turns out, excel services leverages the browser to print and content was missing. Tried to use the free excel viewer after editing the one cell in Sharepoint but got "Excel not installed" and viewer alone would not allow editing of that one cell. These other departments did not want to pay for a license of Office. After all this and people asking me for a quick solution I suggested using......*drum roll* Open Office's Calc program, (which I tested and would fulfill the requirements (free, easy to use, would open from MOSS 2007 repository and print all content)) but was told I was insane. "We can't use that!".....Now I'm not anti-microsoft nor necessarily pro open source, but here was a situation that the requirements and cost and time requirements were SCREAMING for Calc and it was rejected. Even as I pushed for it...I was pressed for a better solution under the (don't want to pay more, nor want to write a custom web solution, nor want to undergo another approval process, nor have more than 3 days. and for some reason, Calc was unreasonable?
Can anyone tell me or take a guess at why this solution was not the best or give a better solution given these constraints?
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We have Sharepoint at my org, and a department needed to be able to edit 1(one) field in an excel worksheet to perform calculations on other fields and print the full results (using Excel on workstation without paying office licenses on many workstations). They called me for a solution and of course needed one in 3 days. These calcs (in the spreadsheet) had already been through a stringent review process and since we had Excel services for MOSS 2007, we thought all is well. Turns out, excel services leverages the browser to print and content was missing. Tried to use the free excel viewer after editing the one cell in Sharepoint but got "Excel not installed" and viewer alone would not allow editing of that one cell. These other departments did not want to pay for a license of Office. After all this and people asking me for a quick solution I suggested using......*drum roll* Open Office's Calc program, (which I tested and would fulfill the requirements (free, easy to use, would open from MOSS 2007 repository and print all content)) but was told I was insane. "We can't use that!".....Now I'm not anti-microsoft nor necessarily pro open source, but here was a situation that the requirements and cost and time requirements were SCREAMING for Calc and it was rejected. Even as I pushed for it...I was pressed for a better solution under the (don't want to pay more, nor want to write a custom web solution, nor want to undergo another approval process, nor have more than 3 days. and for some reason, Calc was unreasonable? Can anyone tell me or take a guess at why this solution was not the best or give a better solution given these constraints?