Turning an excel document into an application?

August 1, 2008 8:17 AM

Turning Excel data into an interactive, wizard-like app?

We've got a rather large Excel spreadsheet that we'd like to be able to serve up as a wizard-like app. The document is a list of about 200 software products, each of which has 50 or so attributes. The products are the rows, attributes are the columns.

Most of the columns are yes/no, a few are text fields.

Is there any good/easy/inexpensive way to turn this into a very user friendly app? So, for instance, somebody could place check marks next to the attributes they need, and it returns a list of products that have checkmarks in those columns? The app could ignore the text fields and only reference the columns that are either on or off.

This would be delivered electronically, so it could either be a downloadable app or a password-protected web page. Would prefer that it be the former.

posted by jbickers to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Hit up google for Excel Forms - while I'm no Excel wiz, I'm pretty sure you can do everything you want from within Excel itself.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:26 AM on August 1, 2008

Response by poster: I'm pretty sure you can do everything you want from within Excel itself.

But we'd rather not presume that everybody who uses it will have a copy of Excel.
posted by jbickers at 8:29 AM on August 1, 2008

It's probably possible to do this, but to be honest you're trying to do a database's job with a spreadsheet. It may be easier to do what you want with Access than it is Excel. Heck, you may have a MySQL whiz around that can turn you out a slick web form to do the job.

On preview—you can't turn an Excel spreadsheet into an executable, as far as I know. You probably want a Visual Basic front-end to an Access database if you're a Microsoft house, or a web-based front-end to a MySQL database otherwise.
posted by sonic meat machine at 8:31 AM on August 1, 2008

It doesn't look quite like what you're asking for, but would something similar to VisualXL do the job? It turns spreadsheets into mini Flash apps.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 8:51 AM on August 1, 2008

Look into Resolver: http://www.resolversystems.com/. Takes your spreadsheets and turns it into a Python script.
You can take the resulting code and slap a GUI on it, or whatever you want.
posted by signal at 9:10 AM on August 1, 2008

Response by poster: OK, so let's say I get the data from Excel into Access - how hard is it to construct a front-end form that has logic behind it to pull the appropriate data based on which fields are checked? We have no Access gurus in-house, so I'm wondering if Access' wizard functionality is strong enough to do this.
posted by jbickers at 10:10 AM on August 1, 2008

I'd do it in Flash (or Flex). A standalone projector or AIR app could serve as the downloadable.
posted by thinman at 10:35 AM on August 1, 2008

If you are working on the assumption that your users may not have Excel, then there's no point looking into Access. There's really no way someone would have Access but not Excel.

Unfortunately, I don't have any solutions in mind other than hiring a developer to create a web app.
posted by junesix at 10:51 AM on August 1, 2008

Pivot tables plus some VBA should do the trick. Its not necessarily easy, but it'll work.
posted by wongcorgi at 10:55 AM on August 1, 2008

junesix, you can have a front-end to an Access db without having Access on the computer the front-end is running on.
posted by sonic meat machine at 7:14 PM on August 1, 2008

sonic meat machine: Sure, I know that but what's the point? The asker was looking for an easy way to build an app frontend for an Excel worksheet. The point of suggesting Access to begin with was an easy tool for designing a frontend. If Access as a frontend isn't an option, then what's the point of learning how to use it just as a database?
posted by junesix at 11:43 AM on August 4, 2008