Our client had a 15 year old program that uses Excel for the user interface and Access to store the data. The company is expanding and the program was running slow and running out the space. We migrated the data from Access to SQL Server. This effectively removes the size constraint and make the queries much faster.
It allows encrypting the social security numbers and it’s easier to deploy upgrades the code or file templates. To make maintenance easier, we used windows security, so as people come and go, the network admin just has to add or remove the user from a windows group.
Using Excel as a front end to a SQL Server database keeps training cost down as most users are familiar with Excel and we use our experience to ‘lock down’ the workbooks to keep data integrity. It also gives the users an easy way to get information for ad-hoc reports and presentations (i.e. Excel to PowerPoint), without having to come back to the developers for program modifications.
Our client now has a program that’s easier to change as their business needs change.
Where can we help you streamline those ‘bottleneck’ processes?
Supporting your growing business
Here’s a situation we run into with our client. Someone builds a model in Excel and it works great. Time goes by and the business grows. That single workbook gets copied for the new customer/division/business unit. Quite a bit of manual work is needed to make it work...