Printing out nice reports in Excel

[Kurt Häusler]

Hi,
an old boss of mine is in the real estate financing business and used
to use a couple of VB programs that he had someone write to basically take
as input some numbers from a customer, apply them to some tax formulas and
produce some nice printed reports illustrating the different outcomes over
time for choosing different options. Fairly basic stuff.

Now the formulas have changed and he needs to update the program but
doesnt have the source code, and he wanted me to write it from scratch.

I told him that would be overkill and it would probably be better just to
use Excel, as he uses it every day. I personally have hardly ever used it
but he still seems to think that I would be able to do it better than him
because I am a programmer.

He also doubts Excel can do it without a lot of complicated mucking
around/coding both to set up the spreadsheet and each time entering data.
He also thinks it would be too ugly, he doesnt want to hand his customers
the raw printout of Excel with the grid, the headings etc, but I am sure
its possible to either do some formatting or perhaps Excel has a built in
report generator or something.

Now I cant be bothered doing it for him, I want to just point him towards
some info so he can do it himself as he mentioned he might need several of
these "programs".

I am unsure if he uses version 2002 or 2003 but im pretty sure its one of
those two. (I just asked him to clarify and he says "2005 from office
2006"; no hes not on a mac or anything this is the windows version)

Can anyone please tell me if a normal Excel user should be able to print
nice reports without coding and if so point me in the right direction for
info about it? Whether I need to look for a special report generator or
its just a simple formatting issue.

Thanks a lot

Kurt

 

[CLR]

Depends on what "nice" means. There is a feature built in to Excel reached
by doing Format > Autoformat, and then making selections. These options will
give better looking stuff than just the "Excel-grid" appearance. But for the
"really nice stuff", it takes too much time to do on a frequent basis,
therefore a VBA macro to do the formatting is much desirable. If he don't
have the soruce code, nor VBA proficiency, and you don't have the time, then
he needs to either select one of the built-in formats or be directed to a VBA
Programmer who has time available. Most any one of the frequent responders
to these Excel Newsgroups may be interested.

Vaya con Dios,
Chuck, CABGx3

 

[Kurt Häusler]

Depends on what "nice" means. There is a feature built in to Excel reached
by doing Format > Autoformat, and then making selections. These options will
give better looking stuff than just the "Excel-grid" appearance. But for the
"really nice stuff", it takes too much time to do on a frequent basis,
therefore a VBA macro to do the formatting is much desirable. If he don't
have the soruce code, nor VBA proficiency, and you don't have the time, then
he needs to either select one of the built-in formats or be directed to a VBA
Programmer who has time available. Most any one of the frequent responders
to these Excel Newsgroups may be interested.

Hey thanks a lot, I actually did something like this once in Access and it
seemed a bit more easier due to the extensive reporting there but that
would also be overkill in this case I think.

I passed on the suggestions, hope he works it all out, cos I am not a
VB(A) coder or even an Excel user really.

 

[Bill Sharpe]

Hi,
an old boss of mine is in the real estate financing business and used
to use a couple of VB programs that he had someone write to basically take
as input some numbers from a customer, apply them to some tax formulas and
produce some nice printed reports illustrating the different outcomes over
time for choosing different options. Fairly basic stuff.

Now the formulas have changed and he needs to update the program but
doesnt have the source code, and he wanted me to write it from scratch.

I told him that would be overkill and it would probably be better just to
use Excel, as he uses it every day. I personally have hardly ever used it
but he still seems to think that I would be able to do it better than him
because I am a programmer.

He also doubts Excel can do it without a lot of complicated mucking
around/coding both to set up the spreadsheet and each time entering data.
He also thinks it would be too ugly, he doesnt want to hand his customers
the raw printout of Excel with the grid, the headings etc, but I am sure
its possible to either do some formatting or perhaps Excel has a built in
report generator or something.

Now I cant be bothered doing it for him, I want to just point him towards
some info so he can do it himself as he mentioned he might need several of
these "programs".

I am unsure if he uses version 2002 or 2003 but im pretty sure its one of
those two. (I just asked him to clarify and he says "2005 from office
2006"; no hes not on a mac or anything this is the windows version)

Can anyone please tell me if a normal Excel user should be able to print
nice reports without coding and if so point me in the right direction for
info about it? Whether I need to look for a special report generator or
its just a simple formatting issue.

Thanks a lot

Kurt

"Excel" and "nice reports" generally don't show up in the same sentence.
As you mention, Access is much better suited for generating reports.
However, Excel 2007 has improved formatting significantly, so that
upgrade may help.
If the old boss doesn't even know what version of Excel he has I doubt
that he can generate a good-looking report in Excel. He certainly can
get rid of the grid lines and the row and column headings easily, though.

Bill