Fun New Product at Work
September 17, 2007 2:57 PM Subscribe
The management at the company I'm working for has sold a couple customers on a product that we as the worker-bees have yet to produce. That being said I view this more as an opportunity to do something new than as a huge hassle, assuming we can figure out a convenient way of producing said product. So I was hoping the great and wonderful MeFi might have a couple suggestions they might throw my way.
The product is in essence a summary of our larger, more expensive daily product. There are several standard headings under which certain transactions will be listed with little or no description. There are several different people who will be editing this, none of whom are particularly technically proficient, but not afraid to try new things. I am hoping that someone has some suggestions on how I can create a fairly simple form where my co-workers can submit today's info and it will be 1)stored in a database and 2) entered on the form for production, which will most likely be sent out as a pdf.
As of today we have a Word document that looks more or less how we want the product to look and an Excel workbook for entering the transactions, with various columns and worksheets for the designated sections. We have the excel sheets so we can save the daily info for future reference and so that one person can format the word doc. from the information others place on the excel sheet.
This does not seem like a good way to do this at all, but it is a very very quick fix for a product that was kicked off more or less without our knowledge.
What I would like to do would be to automate this process as much as possible. I imagine this is possible through vb, but I don't have much experience with it and I have found word's formatting to be finicky. Right now I am learning a bit of Ruby, so I was thinking that I might try my hand at a Rails app that would allow my co-workers to enter the information and store it on a locally hosted database, and take the daily input and drop it in an html doc with appropriate formatting for each division. Ultimately I think the output should be a webpage rather than a pdf, but getting that approved by the management would be difficult, unless it was well polished.
If anyone has a suggestion of a way to create a form that multiple people can add to, that maintains its formatting; and a simple way to store data from the previous posts please let me know. It seems like this would be a common issue, and the manager would be down to purchase some software if necessary so if there is some application that could do what we need pretty easily, we could probably get that. Or if you think that this is ridiculous and we should just roll with our current methodology, that's useful too. I apologize if this post is rambling, but I'm closing in on the tail end of a very very long day and the coffee is wearing off.
The product is in essence a summary of our larger, more expensive daily product. There are several standard headings under which certain transactions will be listed with little or no description. There are several different people who will be editing this, none of whom are particularly technically proficient, but not afraid to try new things. I am hoping that someone has some suggestions on how I can create a fairly simple form where my co-workers can submit today's info and it will be 1)stored in a database and 2) entered on the form for production, which will most likely be sent out as a pdf.
As of today we have a Word document that looks more or less how we want the product to look and an Excel workbook for entering the transactions, with various columns and worksheets for the designated sections. We have the excel sheets so we can save the daily info for future reference and so that one person can format the word doc. from the information others place on the excel sheet.
This does not seem like a good way to do this at all, but it is a very very quick fix for a product that was kicked off more or less without our knowledge.
What I would like to do would be to automate this process as much as possible. I imagine this is possible through vb, but I don't have much experience with it and I have found word's formatting to be finicky. Right now I am learning a bit of Ruby, so I was thinking that I might try my hand at a Rails app that would allow my co-workers to enter the information and store it on a locally hosted database, and take the daily input and drop it in an html doc with appropriate formatting for each division. Ultimately I think the output should be a webpage rather than a pdf, but getting that approved by the management would be difficult, unless it was well polished.
If anyone has a suggestion of a way to create a form that multiple people can add to, that maintains its formatting; and a simple way to store data from the previous posts please let me know. It seems like this would be a common issue, and the manager would be down to purchase some software if necessary so if there is some application that could do what we need pretty easily, we could probably get that. Or if you think that this is ridiculous and we should just roll with our current methodology, that's useful too. I apologize if this post is rambling, but I'm closing in on the tail end of a very very long day and the coffee is wearing off.
If you're already using MS-Office, and the size of the dataset is too small to justify a product like Oracle, the database tool to use is MS-Access, not Excel.
Access documents can handle multiple-user access (by locking records while they are being edited, for example) and the IDE lets you write specific forms to do specific jobs (add and order, print a receipt, change a customer's contact info, etc). Access plays nice with SQL Server, if you want to add a web-based interface.
The database is relational, so you can keep (for example) a product database that relates to your order database, that also ties into a customer database & cut down on redundant data.
Development of the end-user IDE is much like VB, and there are wizards for creating the forms and SQL queries.
Later, if you need an Excel sheet (for use as a pivot table or suchlike) you can generate one from the Access database.
posted by Crosius at 3:27 PM on September 17, 2007
Access documents can handle multiple-user access (by locking records while they are being edited, for example) and the IDE lets you write specific forms to do specific jobs (add and order, print a receipt, change a customer's contact info, etc). Access plays nice with SQL Server, if you want to add a web-based interface.
The database is relational, so you can keep (for example) a product database that relates to your order database, that also ties into a customer database & cut down on redundant data.
Development of the end-user IDE is much like VB, and there are wizards for creating the forms and SQL queries.
Later, if you need an Excel sheet (for use as a pivot table or suchlike) you can generate one from the Access database.
posted by Crosius at 3:27 PM on September 17, 2007
Get an off-the-shelf Content Management System. Use HTML for the markup (that's what it is designed for). Collaborate wirth your colleagues to create the content. Export the content-filled pages to pdf. Send the pdfs to the customers.
posted by orthogonality at 4:13 PM on September 17, 2007 [1 favorite]
posted by orthogonality at 4:13 PM on September 17, 2007 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by juv3nal at 3:19 PM on September 17, 2007