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We have
unrivalled expertise in
the development of applications designed to work with MS
OfficeTM. Much of this expertise was gained in
the development of various products, and has been
subsequently exploited in the provision of several custom
solutions, some of which are described here:
Container
Traceability
System
This
system was developed as an integration application for a client
who needed to combine data held in two different systems. These
systems held data on the current location of millions of glass
containers, as well as their process history. The common factor
in both systems was the use of MS Excel as a reporting
interface. Our system attached to Excel, monitoring Excel events
and responding to the creation, opening and closing of the
various Excel reports. Users could the simply choose which
reports to merge, and our system then carried out a traceability
analysis and generated a new composite report.
SMS Add-In for
MS Outlook
Our
CommuniText™
for Outlook™
add-in
performs what appears to be a simple task, but is in fact a
sophisticated COM add-in, fully integrated into MS
Outlook™
(right down to an integrated properties page).
MS Word™ Templates
We are pleased to have developed many custom Word document
templates for several departments in this Major UK Banking and Insurance company.
We converted
and re-designed their entire set of about twenty ‘standard’
document templates from Word V2.0 to Word 6.0, observing their
new corporate layout standards and adding a user-friendly,
dialog-driven front end.
For secretarial areas, we added automatic document archiving and
naming facilities which automatically create new directories
each month, for each user. For other departments with a large
number of locally-produced templates, Exmos
was easily able to integrate these in a
user-friendly way with the standard corporate ‘front end.’
We have also developed extremely complex Word Wizards which create
entire model pension scheme documents from literally hundreds of
‘boiler plate’ text paragraphs, according to many dozens of
complex and inter-dependent user selections made by selecting
check boxes and selection buttons on the
Wizard panels. These
Wizards were written to provide PC replacements for programs
written on an ageing Wang machine.
MS Word™ Template Automation
We worked with the in-house team
of this Government Department to improve and upgrade
their existing document templates, adding links to their
in-house Windows Help files from the user dialogs presented by
the templates.
We also developed a solution to their requirement
for context-sensitive document writing guidelines for each part
of the generated document. All the guidelines are fully editable
by administrators, using Exmos-developed custom dialogs. We
also assisted this client in migrating their WordBASIC
templates to VBA.
Reporting Tools for Sun Accounts™
This client had a requirement to produce various management reports in
MS Excel™ from data stored in their Sun Accounts system. At the same
time, they also had a requirement to extract some raw data for further
analysis or to form the input into other reports.
Our solution was to use the ODBC data extract capabilities of Excel along
with some sophisticated backend SQL Server stored procedures. Some of these
stored procedures receive parameters derived from data stored on the
spreadsheet.
Some very sophisticated and flexible third-party reporting tools
exist for Sun Accounts. However, they were either over the top
for some of the simple extracts or incapable of performing some
of the more sophisticated analysis required.
Even having bought
such a tool, there would still have been a cost to design and
implement the reports, as well as training and ongoing software
maintenance. By utilising software they already licenced,
the investment was made in directly creating the solution.
Our methodology now allows these style of reports to be created
relatively quickly.
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