Professional Excel Development [Electronic resources] : The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft® Excel and VBA® نسخه متنی

Examples

Throughout the book, we illustrate the concepts and techniques we introduce by building a timesheet data-entry, consolidation, analysis and reporting application. This application comprises a data-entry template to be completed by each employee, with the data sent to a central location for consolidation, analysis and reporting. The end of each chapter presents a fully working example of both parts of the application included on the CD, which grows steadily more complex as the book progresses and therefore will be relevant to different types of companies.

In Chapter 4 Worksheet Design, we start with a very simple data-entry workbook and the assumption that each employee would e-mail the completed file to a manager, who would analyze the results manuallya typical situation for a company with perhaps 10 to 20 employees.

By the end of the book, the data-entry workbook uses XML to upload the data to a Web service, where it is stored in a central database. The reporting application extracts the data from the database, performs various analyses and presents the results as reports in Excel worksheets and charts.

Along the way, we rewrite some of the parts of the application in a number of different ways, to show how easy it can be to include other languages and delivery mechanisms in our Excel-based applications.

Each chapter may also include specific examples to illustrate key points that it would be too artificial to include in our main application.