Neblog

If you’ve been reading my other blog entries, you know I’ve been working a lot with Excel lately. I worked intensely with this environment several years ago. I’ve found all of the Microsoft Office applications to be fun to work with at the object model level - OK, call me a geek. Unfortunately MS Office apps have always been far behind the technology curve when it comes to developer tools. These are my notes about how to do the development that I need given the state of the tools available.

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A long time ago there was a product called CrowFlight that retrieved data into Excel from MV. Some companies still have it and I occassionally get a call from someone looking to replace it. Well… I now have two ways of using Excel formulas to call into MV, and this functionality can be combined with NebulaXLite.

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We released a new product today, though it’s been on the website for about a month to start drumming up interest - and that it did. NebulaXLite allows MV BASIC to create "real" Excel workbooks - and it seems to work with OpenOffice and Google Doc Spreadsheets too! We also have a new forum to discuss our product and service offerings.

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This is a response to an inquiry in the U2 tech forum about the need to use [Worksheet$] syntax in a SQL query, and the idea that an Excel worksheet is treated like a System Table. This isn’t really a U2 topic so I thought I’d tackle it here.

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Faced with a migration from your current software package? Lost a client to Oracle, SAP, Quckbooks? Many MV shops lose the war because they aren’t invited to the battles. And sometimes even the people who win wind up losing. There is a better way.

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Why do I suddenly feel like someone just asked me if this computer thing will really catch on, or if water is a good idea?

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A recent forum posting said the D3 Reference Manual is "confused" about which %functions are for Unix and which are for Windows. I have a lot of comments on this topic but with just a couple minor exceptions I disagree with the statement that the doc is really "confused" anymore.

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One of our colleagues asked a good question in a forum yesterday about when to use UnNamed Common vs Named Common in Pick BASIC programs. I thought this would be a good opportunity to post some detailed information to the MV category here in the blog so that everyone could see it.

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It’s started - people are getting more comfortable with DesignBais, learning the strengths and how to deal with the weaknesses. When the first release of a new application UI is in production and developers look back to see what they can do better (and respond to the end-user enhancement requests), they’re starting to get creative, get more out of the software, make it do things that isn’t in the documentation. And now the question has come up in the DesignBais forum - "should" we be coding into the internals of DesignBais? Here are my thoughts.

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We programmers are always happy to find tools that make our lives a little easier. Good code editors are hard to come by, and we don’t want to use different editors for VB, Java, C#, HTML, XML, PHP, Perl, Python, SQL, or a hundred other languages. Once in a long while an individual will take it upon himself to create a good code editor for his own use, and then share it with the world. But what happens that that guy gets tired - or gets a life?

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