This is a sort of follow-on to one of my postings last month. My intent here is to kick off some forum discussions based on today’s posting. The question in short is: We have some great tools for tight integration with Excel that are going to be available very soon, so what else do end-users want or need?
Over the years I’ve done a lot of work with the internals of Excel and most of the other Microsoft Office applications, integrating them in some way with Pick/MV business applications. Now I’m looking to do more with Excel – but what do you want to see?
I recently blogged and Introduction to NebulaXPlus. Today I present a slightly different approach to that introduction. Consider this an AD, but I believe it will help to explain what we’re now able to do.
If you want to create sophisticated Excel workbooks with your Pick BASIC application, you may be using NebulaXLite. While a “lite” tool, it does satisfy most needs. If you want to do more we now have NebulaXPlus.
Valued clients – Once again I’ve been informed that NebulaXLite is likely to de-activate sometime soon. As discussed here in my blog this only happens on Windows after an OS update, once or twice per year at some sites, and not at all at others.
We’ve been informed that Permanent activations for NebulaXLite have suddenly de-activated at a couple sites. This same situation occurred about four months ago. The working theory is that a Windows Update replaces some key OS files that are used as “supposedly” consistent markers. The fastest solution to the problem is simply to generate a new request so that we can […]
Over the last two weeks we’ve had some reports of permanent keys for NebulaXLite suddenly deactivating. This doesn’t seem to be affecting developers or trial licenses. It’s happened on Universe and D3, no reports from other platforms yet. I encourage application developers to check with your end-users to ensure their product is still functioning as expected.
In this blog entry from 2007 I documented a new offering called NebulaXChange. As NebulaXLite creates rich spreadsheets from BASIC, NebulaXChange is intended to work on the opposite side, with Excel reaching into MV. After well over a year and a great deal of heartache NebulaXChange lives!
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.