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Upon suggestion this question has been amended to the following;

Does anyone here know about Baan as a system and if so how compatible (if at all) is it with Excel from a developer's point of view? I need to pull reports from Baan to populate Excel workbooks and be able to take certain portions of data into other workbooks without bringing in the whole code and sifting through it.

JamesDev
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    No offense meant, but can you please cut out your life story and simply state the question? You don't have to make nice small talk to persuade us into helping you - if we didn't want to help, we wouldn't be reading the question. – Superbest Sep 25 '12 at 06:52
  • I figured if you had a background of my knowledge and what I was trying to do then you would have a better understanding of what I do and do not know at this stage. This would stop people from posting overly complex answers that I would not be able to use and would be a waste of everyone's time. – JamesDev Sep 25 '12 at 07:03
  • Using 15 lines to ask a 2 line question wastes far more time. Probably nobody will care to craft a tailor-made explanation for you (they'll just give you the usual answer), but if they did, that would make the question less useful to other people with the same problem. Saying "please keep it simple, I can't understand!" also gives potential answerers that you are lazy and unwilling to learn (not saying you are, just that's how it looks). – Superbest Sep 25 '12 at 07:16
  • I agree, but I doubt someone else somewhere is sitting in their office wondering if they have been brought in to keep the peace with the workers so it looks like they are trying to improve. They really need a whole new system tbh but they employed me hoping for a cheap quick fix – JamesDev Sep 25 '12 at 07:20
  • We can't really help you with workplace problems. You can try http://workplace.stackexchange.com/. We can answer programming questions, but you must state the question clearly. – Superbest Sep 25 '12 at 07:29
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    How's that for an edit of the overall problem without my personal grievances included? – JamesDev Sep 25 '12 at 07:32

2 Answers2

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This is really 3 independent questions:

  1. How do I parse a BaaN report in C#? (You may have some trouble with this, unfortunately.)

  2. How do I read an Excel file in C#?

  3. How do I generate an Excel file in C#?

Community
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Superbest
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  • Having already searched through these I still found nothing in there to do with the Baan system funnily enough. I wanted really a general overview of what the best route to go down is and how simple it would be to create smaller toolkits that won't solve the overall issue that their systems are outdated and incompatible but would still improve productivity – JamesDev Sep 25 '12 at 07:16
  • Sorry, I wasn't clear that Baan was the software generating the report. I suggest you edit the question so it asks only for 1, since 2 and 3 are trivial. It may also help if you describe the report, since I'm sure a lot of people who see this will be familiar with C#, but not Baan, and sounds like you're "on your own" since they dropped support - you may have to write the parsing code yourself (or try other languages?). – Superbest Sep 25 '12 at 07:22
  • The thing is that I don't even know how Baan works and similarly most people within the company get on with it and hate it but don't know how it works either. I am literally the only computer programmer on site and as such have literally no one to go to about any issues. I am comfortable in VB.Net but C++ is a no go for me – JamesDev Sep 25 '12 at 07:29
  • To be honest, sounds like you're out of your depth - if you can't find code that does this, the straightforward solution is to find a programmer who knows Baan and hire him, but he may realize you're stuck and hike the price. The hackish way is to sit down and reverse engineer the report format, which would be laborious. The adventurous solution would be to find what language does have a Baan library written in it, and learn that. Then there's always putting it on Mechanical Turk for cheap, manual data entry... – Superbest Sep 25 '12 at 07:35
  • And right there you hit the nail on the head. They have seen that I am a programmer, alright it's games but I know OO, and think that because I am a technical person I can pick it all up and go straight through it. I think the way around it as you suggest is going to be to learn the system whilst trying to figure out what Baan libraries there are and whether or not I need to learn a new language. Thanks for the help and the words of......oh let's go with encouragement anyway :) – JamesDev Sep 25 '12 at 07:39
  • Yep, pick your poison. Good luck! Hopefully someone with experience doing this might come by and answer - until then, if you are looking to save effort, you might try looking into *older solutions*: Someone must have written code for it back when it wasn't obsolete. Then see if you can salvage that. – Superbest Sep 25 '12 at 07:42
  • You'll be interested to find out also that despite working on a simple application to get to grips with interoperability and it turns out that due to the fact that we do not have administrative rights on this system (due to the parent company) that I cannot run most of the things I need to – JamesDev Sep 25 '12 at 09:24
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if you are looking the pull data from data source into excel that is just tabulate format. so what you need to learn is excel inter-op with C# and that is very simple i can provide you some of samples. as like.

http://vscontrols.blogspot.com/2010/09/manipulating-excel-using-adonet.html

and if you are looking to pull complex data and matrix values from the Data Source then i suggest you to read about the EXCEL DNA its an open source having power to play around the Excel widely.

JSJ
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