Suggestions?

Hey guys,

I did a pricesheet in excel which turned out pretty nice, can adjust the profits on parts easily or change the price and see what the profit percentage is, etc...

The guys seemed to have liked it enough to where they want to put everything in it... but a spreadsheet doesnt seem to fit the job.

Heres what I would like:

You open a program (whether custom, Access, etc) and get to choose from a popup/drop down list which category you are building the price sheet for... this could be for example a car, boat, etc... Then you would have another drop down where you could choose which engine (and engine selection is based off which category you choose... so if you choose car A, then you cant choose car B's engines here).

Then you could choose from a spreadsheet (with checkboxes) the parts you want to calculate cost for... and the parts would be based off the category you choose (so again you cant see car B's parts if you've choose car A).

I know Access seems like it would work but since we would not be storing the part calculations (this is more of a just a pricebook/calculate once sort of tool) it just doesnt seem to be the right tool.

Id like the parts list to be a database which would be easily updateable from else where. And on printing only the checked parts would show up.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

Access would probably do the job for a database that only one person uses at a time. This can scale up to a few concurrent users but the problems you would inevitably face will be horrors to fix.

As you want it to be "easily updateable from elsewhere" then I recommend that you step up to SQL Server. You could still use Access to provide the user dialogue but it would probably be better to move to VB.NET or ASP.NET. The small number of local users (on a LAN?) that you have could be implemented using free downloads from Microsoft.

There is a big question that I have so far side-stepped. These technologies require some skill and experience to use. Have you got access to this?

Non-Microsoft technologies such as MySQL and PHP would do the job just as well but they need different skills and experience.

Hey,

Thanks for the reply.

Im leaning more towards a php and js based solution - which I only have a little knowledge of and have been talking with a programmer friend who has a good standing in the OS community.

I was originally thinking VB (since I used to program years ago) to handle the excel file, but dont know about that.

You'll probably find that if you use ASP or ASP.NET that you'll be right at home with your prior VB experience... That would handle the front-end, from there it is a simple matter of a backend... MySQL, SQL, SQL Express, ORACLE, Access, .txt files to name a few...

-saige-