[thelist] Excel to WWW

[Ken Schaefer]

How would Excel do all of this? Excel is interactive program, not some kind
of background service.

You could certainly have the user download a sheet, and email it back. You
then need some kind of event (e.g. an Exchange event sink) that can kick of
processing, or some kind of service monitoring inbound mail.

You can use the Jet OLEDB Text Provider to connect to Excel spreadsheets and
extract the data.
Alternatively, you could use server-side Excel automatation to import the
data into an existing Excel workbook, and have it perform the calculations.
You'd then query the appropriate areas of Excel to get the final "score"
which you could output to a webpage.

I'm not really sure how scalable server-side Excel automation is - Excel
wasn't designed as a multi-user application/service.

Cheers
Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Rob Smith
Subject: Re: [thelist] Excel to WWW

Ok. We liked your responses thus far, however, my buddy would like to
know if there is a way to: 
1) Download the locked questions page. It's open just for the responses.
2) The prospect emails that sheet back.
3) The software magically takes the attachment...
4) Imports the data...
5) Calculates the data...
6) Then automatically responds with the correct "results" page

(all within excel mind you)

Hoping for a miracle,

Rob Smith