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Manipulating Excel Spreadsheets in Dolphin

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Tom Ayerst

Manipulating Excel Spreadsheets in Dolphin

I am planning an application that will build, manage and run various
complicated Excel spreadsheets.

I believe this can be done with Dolphin but I am trying to find out,
from people who have actually done it anger, how appropriate it is to
use Dolphin, rather than using a MS tool.

Does anyone want to share experiences?

Thanks.

Tom Ayerst

Jeffrey Odell-2

Re: Manipulating Excel Spreadsheets in Dolphin

I've done it with VisualAge Smalltalk, and the COM wrapper there is not as
complete or robust as the one in Dolphin. I think it is perfectly logical
to use Dolphin to create spreadsheets.

Having said that, make sure that you really want to delve in to programming
the Microsoft Common Object Model that is Excel. There are 10s to 100s of
objects and it is quite tedious. Have a look in the documentation of the
object model. If your spreadsheets are complicated, then it may well be
worth it, but have a look.

One GREAT thing about using Smalltalk for this is you can create much more
powerful Smalltalk objects that combine functions across several Excel COM
objects, essentially creating a much more powerful spreadsheet-building
object system. I'm always looking to do this any time I get my hands on
fine grained COM objects - MS Office objects are a prime example.

That being said, many times, it is better/easier to extract comma separated
data to a file, then use some well placed macros in Excel spreadsheets
create reports from it. A side benefit to this is your user can change the
spreadsheet, rather than coming back to the developer to make minor changes.

HTH -

jlo

"Tom Ayerst" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...

> I am planning an application that will build, manage and run various
> complicated Excel spreadsheets.
>
> I believe this can be done with Dolphin but I am trying to find out,
> from people who have actually done it anger, how appropriate it is to
> use Dolphin, rather than using a MS tool.
>
> Does anyone want to share experiences?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Tom Ayerst

Tom Ayerst

Re: Manipulating Excel Spreadsheets in Dolphin

Thanks for the encouragement.

The spreadsheets in question are big and complicated (they are very
sophisticated and complex models in their own right). This makes them
hard to write and check and maintain. The aim of this project is to
give the spreadsheet developers an initial leg up and tools to support
them. Once a spreadsheet model is created it should, if necessary, be
able to stand alone.

Cheers

Tom

Jeffrey Odell wrote:

> I've done it with VisualAge Smalltalk, and the COM wrapper there is not as
> complete or robust as the one in Dolphin. I think it is perfectly logical
> to use Dolphin to create spreadsheets.
>
> Having said that, make sure that you really want to delve in to programming
> the Microsoft Common Object Model that is Excel. There are 10s to 100s of
> objects and it is quite tedious. Have a look in the documentation of the
> object model. If your spreadsheets are complicated, then it may well be
> worth it, but have a look.
>
> One GREAT thing about using Smalltalk for this is you can create much more
> powerful Smalltalk objects that combine functions across several Excel COM
> objects, essentially creating a much more powerful spreadsheet-building
> object system. I'm always looking to do this any time I get my hands on
> fine grained COM objects - MS Office objects are a prime example.
>
> That being said, many times, it is better/easier to extract comma separated
> data to a file, then use some well placed macros in Excel spreadsheets
> create reports from it. A side benefit to this is your user can change the
> spreadsheet, rather than coming back to the developer to make minor changes.
>
> HTH -
>
> jlo
>
> "Tom Ayerst" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
> news:[hidden email]...
>
>>I am planning an application that will build, manage and run various
>>complicated Excel spreadsheets.
>>
>>I believe this can be done with Dolphin but I am trying to find out,
>>from people who have actually done it anger, how appropriate it is to
>>use Dolphin, rather than using a MS tool.
>>
>>Does anyone want to share experiences?
>>
>>Thanks.
>>
>>Tom Ayerst
>
>
>

Christopher J. Demers

Re: Manipulating Excel Spreadsheets in Dolphin

In reply to this post by Tom Ayerst

Tom Ayerst <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...
> I am planning an application that will build, manage and run various
> complicated Excel spreadsheets.
>
> I believe this can be done with Dolphin but I am trying to find out,
> from people who have actually done it anger, how appropriate it is to
> use Dolphin, rather than using a MS tool.

I have used Excel via ActiveX from Dolphin and it works well. Initially I
ran into some small complications that required me to do a little
investigating. I think most of the issues I ran into were posted and solved
here, so if you do a search you might find them. Using ActiveX components
from Dolphin does require a little more initial overhead than VB. However I
find Smalltalk to be a much more powerful development environment than VB so
this small amount of overheard is well worth it.

Chris