Need help with Excel >__<

[DanaTA]

More stable and greater capacity. But yeah, if it's just something small for yourself...however, it's my area of expertise. Just don't say Access! What a dog! I use MS SQL Server on my website, and have SSMS on my computer to access and work with it. The whole site is data driven.

Dana

 

[Ken1171]

That's how things should be - data driven. I used to work with Oracle client/server applications, usually creating the client-side layer to access data from a remote server. I remember it was very secure, robust and reliable. We were using Paradox before that, which was much lighter and portable, but quite flaky and unreliable. Nowadays we have all sorts of ways to emulate a database, even using XML plain text, which can be an alternative for small scale databases. Even Adobe Flash AS3 had native support for XML databases, to include queries. Some web applications use XML with Python to manage local data as if in a database using XML. It seems the modern paradigm is distributed systems instead of a centralized server.

 

[DanaTA]

Paradox...never used it. The company that made it also made a very good spreadsheet, Quattro Pro. I used it for quite a while, but eventually moved to Excel to be most compatible. When I was working, I was developing using MS FoxPro, first the DOS version, then FoxPro for Windows and eventually Visual FoxPro. It was always ahead of dBase for quality and functionality, and speed. It was a speed demon! MS took FoxPro's Rushmore data engine to try to make Access faster. It did, but even with it, Access was still a dog! I was so surprised that they killed VFP rather than killing Access. Visual FoxPro was really fast, measured faster than DB2 on a server! The Euro tunnel was run by a VFP database and application. There was a big article about it in FoxPro Advisor magazine. I was also devastated...because the company I was working for at the time was going out of business, and MS announced they would make no new versions of it and announced end of support to be in 2012. this was 2006. I used to get calls from headhuters while I was at my desk at work. After that, everyone who used it (and there were lots of companies who used it, including very large financial companies, like Putnam Investments in Boston) all scurried for something that would be supported. MS SQL Server won. I think that's why MS did that. They wanted more use of their server product. There were three VFP jobs nationwide after that. None of them anywhere near me. And I was not about to relocate to Michigan, Texas or Baton Rouge, LA. That last one was only a six to nine month contract. They actually called me at my home. And when I told the guy I wasn't going to leave my wife alone for that amount of time, he kept talking...telling me how much money I'd be paid. He was desperate.

Dana

 

[Ken1171]

That brings me back to when Microsoft killed Borland to remove Turbo Pascal (Delphi and Object Pascal) from the market, forcing everyone to switch to their C++, the king of memory leaks. This was one major reason why many modern programming languages like Java, ActionScript, and C# don't even allow direct memory allocation, using Garbage Collection (GC) instead. Initially, C++ was faster, but with the speed hardware runs nowadays, those things are more difficult to discern. In many cases, the dangers of direct memory allocation can outweigh it's performance advantages. I have used languages with and without GC, and in my experience, memory leaks are some of the trickiest things to debug. Conversely, not being able to control when GC will kick in can be an issue too. This week I have read an article showing that C# now allows controlling when GC is called, making it more granular and reducing its impact on performance. Sounds like things are slowly trying to move away from C++.

 

[DanaTA]

Some of the pages on my site are C#, but most are VB. Historically, database languages used by dBase and FoxPro, generically called X-Base, were very similar to BASIC in structure. So that's what I moved to when I decided to learn new stuff to be marketable (another sad story that I'll not get into here). I found that Visual Basic was no longer your father's BASIC, and so, struggled with it for quite a while, on my own. The transition to SQL Server was not as difficult, as VFP used the SQL language with few differences. In fact, VFP had a tool that upgraded a VFP database to SQL Server database.

Dana

 

[Ken1171]

Hehe VB started as BASIC, but as languages evolved over time, they tried to morph it into something that supports structures and procedurals, turning it into something else. They had to do it because BASIC was dead as a language for decades.

 

[Miss B]

BASIC was the first language I ever learned to program, back in the days of my first DOS computer. Boy does that ever bring back memories. Even back then we used to call it spaghetti code.

 

[Ken1171]

Haha exactly - spaghetti code! That has pushed programming languages to evolve, and Microsoft to morph VB into "something else". Nowadays something similar is happening to JavaScript. It was originally designed for simple tasks, such as validating HTML pages and do some basic operations, like submit forms data. But with the arrival of HTML5, they are trying to turn it into a full object-oriented language, something it was obviously not designed to be. The script has no definition for "class", but we are asked to make believe it does. I think that defines a new programming paradigm - the "imaginary object-oriented" language.

 

[DanaTA]

When I was first learning to program, on my wife's Commodore 64, even then I started to use functions and tried to avoid spaghetti code as much as possible. I don't do very much direct javascript coding. I have controls that I use on my website that work with AJAX, some free from MS, some from a toolkit library called dXperience, by DevExpress - excellent controls, were originally part of a free pack...free for life. They no longer offer the free controls. Thus, I can't get any upgrades to make use of more modern features. Oh, well. What I have is quite functional as it is. I've also replaced some of the cosmetic controls, using CSS instead.

Dana

 

[DanaTA]

They're trying to make CSS like a programming language, too, adding things very much like variables or constants.

Dana

 

[Ken1171]

This is what we get for allowing corporate businessmen to do the job of a computer scientist.

 

[sapat]

Wish I'd seen this thread early on when it started. My hubby is a certified instructor in all Office modules. He also works daily with Excel and Access. He's a guru.

 

[Ken1171]

Wish I'd seen this thread early on when it started. My hubby is a certified instructor in all Office modules. He also works daily with Excel and Access. He's a guru.

Good to know that! I am still intrigued by why hour differences got complicated like this? For example, Excel generates the current time in AM/PM format, and that causes errors in time difference calculations. I have to enter times in 24h, and after that the cell format displays them as AM/PM, but if I type it as AM/PM, the formula fails.

 

[sapat]

Good to know that! I am still intrigued by why hour differences got complicated like this? For example, Excel generates the current time in AM/PM format, and that causes errors in time difference calculations. I have to enter times in 24h, and after that the cell format displays them as AM/PM, but if I type it as AM/PM, the formula fails.

I'll show this to hubby.

 

[Ken1171]

I'll show this to hubby.

Thanks! ^^