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How would you start to automate my work? - Part 2

(Followup to this question )

After you have moved the first wave of inbound deliveries (9 hours of copy / paste), I now believe that I have all the requirements.

The following is an updated workflow:

  • Monkey collects email attachments (4 Excel spreadsheets, 1 PDF).
  • The monkey creates a central database, performs complex calculations (right now it is also an Excel spreadsheet).
  • The monkey sends data to two bosses who set retail prices on their own; first answer to victory
  • Monkey sends an order form to our other warehouses, as well as Excel
  • The monkey sends spreadsheets to VIP clients, carefully disinfects and formats them (4 discount categories).
  • Explicitly enters data into the accounting system. I refused to automate this part, there is too much business logic, and the database is a bunch of sh ^ W legacy

My question is: What technologies would you use for a quick and dirty solution? I mainly sell in C #, but based on the Linux / C ++ background, I was terribly confused about my choice in Microsoft-land.

For bonus points: how would you redesign the entire system from scratch?

Clarification: I'm basically looking for everything that can make me read the right things, just give me the keywords and a short description. Google will guide me from there.

PS in case you are interested, my job title is System Administrator .

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c # windows excel automation
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3 answers

You can interact with excel through Com Interop. See this article on how to do this with C #. This is an ugly solution in the sense that you have to run it on a system with Excel. You do not create spreadsheets; you programmatically tell Excel to create spreadsheets. This has its advantages and disadvantages.

It's easy to create spreadsheets yourself (Excel can open spreadsheet files), although this makes it more complicated in some cases; the easiest way to generate the xls file is to say that Excel will save it (processing excel as a database is also quite simple, but it does not give you access to all Excel functions).

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FROM#. Linus may be nice, but let me assume that you run windows in the company anyway. The main problem will be (1) (attachments, PDF) - everything you do here will rely on them having a certain shape, and I'm sure there is a monkey from the other end sending them that change the layout;)

Anyway, I would go with C # 4.0 completely. Depending on what you are using on the server side ... I can even bypass excel and immediately switch to email exchange.

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in fact, I would do this in Outlook and Excel VBA and in Access. You do not see why it is not possible to clear data from pdf

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