January, 2010

Adding Formatting

Now it's time to add basic formatting.  Formatting is important.  Accountants must see currency values formatted their special way.  Dates must be presented according to regional standards.  Fortunately, adding formatting to your results is as easy as adding one more column to our...

Adding Sorting

Another common requirement for reports is sorting.  While this can be done in SQL with an ORDER BY clause, I like to use Excel to sort because the desktop PC usually has a much higer CPU-Power-to-Number-of-Users ratio than a database server.  Today, we add sort columns to the...

Preserving Column Headers and Key Values

Adding SQL Formulas to the Table

In the last post we linked the Fields Table to some code that translated the table into an SQL Select clause.  Most often, that's enough.  But sometimes we need to manipulate the data before loading it into our result spreadsheet.  We can do that by adding

Adding Tables and Columns to the Fields Table

In my last post I provided some simple tools to manage Excel tables.  This was in preparation for creating and incorporating a "Fields Table" into our reporting system.  The advantages of the Fields table are enumerated in the prior posts.  So lets start using it. The first portion of our...