On Wed, 20 May 2020 20:27:06 +0000, Ian Stewart wrote:
Interesting that SAP's front end sucks so much that there is money to be made selling Excel as the data entry interface.
Not sure if the SAP code sucked that much (in this case), more that companies are so familiar with Excel they refuse to give it up for something better.
I've often wondered if they would be better off to switch from using the Excel / VBA combination to Calc<https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice_Calc> / PyUNO Bridge<https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/PyUNO_bridge> / Python3 and that way they avoid having to use VBA.
A few weeks ago I tried to see if I could produce a grid-of-cells-type display using Jupyter+Python. For example, a mortgage or fixed-deposit payment schedule, where you can try the effect of different interest rates, payment amounts etc--something that is quite commonly done with spreadsheets. That actually worked nicely: I could put up some simple input fields for the starting numbers, plus some radio buttons or checkboxes for options like calculating interest in advance (start of each payment period) or arrears (end of each payment period), so these are the only things the user can modify (apart from the cells containing the Python code, which hopefully they won’t touch). The output cells are, of course, read-only, so no chance of introducing subtle bugs by modifying them. And for those who want charting, Matplotlib offers more charting options than Excel has ever heard of.