04-12-2005, 10:59 PM
Dr.,
Last night I spoke to my son about your idea. He has a Computer Science degree. Anyway, he showed me how an Excel spreadsheet can be "saved as" an HML formatted file, which is a text file that can be easily digested by say a FB program. What's your opinion about this?
On of the major problems that I saw in my previous company was that Excel "databases" lacked data integrity and data validity. An FB program could check for these problems and report.
By data integrity I mean that "key" fields, like maybe employee number, actually exist on the master file (another person's Excel) where employee numbers are maintained with adds, deletes, and changes. You would need a copy of the master file in order to do the checking or matching.
By data validity I mean obvious stuff like:
* numeric fields are truly numeric, and right justified. If the field is a fixed length code, it must have leading zeros to fill out the length. Example: a 9 digit SSN with a leading zero should not appear as 8 digits.
* Alpha or alphanumeric fields should be left justified.
* Dates must be valid regardless of the format.
* Mandatory fields must not be blank or null.
* If a field is to contain a code, like 1, 2, or 3, then obviously it can't contain any other character.
* etc.
If these problems of integrity and validity are ignored, that is, not checked, then in short time the particular "database" is out of sync and full of garbage, and its reports are worthless.
*****
Last night I spoke to my son about your idea. He has a Computer Science degree. Anyway, he showed me how an Excel spreadsheet can be "saved as" an HML formatted file, which is a text file that can be easily digested by say a FB program. What's your opinion about this?
On of the major problems that I saw in my previous company was that Excel "databases" lacked data integrity and data validity. An FB program could check for these problems and report.
By data integrity I mean that "key" fields, like maybe employee number, actually exist on the master file (another person's Excel) where employee numbers are maintained with adds, deletes, and changes. You would need a copy of the master file in order to do the checking or matching.
By data validity I mean obvious stuff like:
* numeric fields are truly numeric, and right justified. If the field is a fixed length code, it must have leading zeros to fill out the length. Example: a 9 digit SSN with a leading zero should not appear as 8 digits.
* Alpha or alphanumeric fields should be left justified.
* Dates must be valid regardless of the format.
* Mandatory fields must not be blank or null.
* If a field is to contain a code, like 1, 2, or 3, then obviously it can't contain any other character.
* etc.
If these problems of integrity and validity are ignored, that is, not checked, then in short time the particular "database" is out of sync and full of garbage, and its reports are worthless.
*****