Kurt Häusler wrote:
Hi,
an old boss of mine is in the real estate financing business and used
to use a couple of VB programs that he had someone write to basically take
as input some numbers from a customer, apply them to some tax formulas and
produce some nice printed reports illustrating the different outcomes over
time for choosing different options. Fairly basic stuff.

Now the formulas have changed and he needs to update the program but
doesnt have the source code, and he wanted me to write it from scratch.

I told him that would be overkill and it would probably be better just to
use Excel, as he uses it every day. I personally have hardly ever used it
but he still seems to think that I would be able to do it better than him
because I am a programmer.

He also doubts Excel can do it without a lot of complicated mucking
around/coding both to set up the spreadsheet and each time entering data.
He also thinks it would be too ugly, he doesnt want to hand his customers
the raw printout of Excel with the grid, the headings etc, but I am sure
its possible to either do some formatting or perhaps Excel has a built in
report generator or something.

Now I cant be bothered doing it for him, I want to just point him towards
some info so he can do it himself as he mentioned he might need several of
these "programs".

I am unsure if he uses version 2002 or 2003 but im pretty sure its one of
those two. (I just asked him to clarify and he says "2005 from office
2006"; no hes not on a mac or anything this is the windows version)

Can anyone please tell me if a normal Excel user should be able to print
nice reports without coding and if so point me in the right direction for
info about it? Whether I need to look for a special report generator or
its just a simple formatting issue.

Thanks a lot

Kurt
"Excel" and "nice reports" generally don't show up in the same sentence.
As you mention, Access is much better suited for generating reports.
However, Excel 2007 has improved formatting significantly, so that
upgrade may help.
If the old boss doesn't even know what version of Excel he has I doubt
that he can generate a good-looking report in Excel. He certainly can
get rid of the grid lines and the row and column headings easily, though.

Bill