Generating Reports from Access and Excel Files? 64
casals asks: "I'm a computer engineer working at a non-IT company, and there's this thing bothering me: by the end of each job, we have to generate a huge report that's actually a composite of lots of minor reports, each one of them made using a different software. Since the softwares used don't interact at all, we have to input the same information five or six times - not too smart, I guess. The outputs are either Access databases or Excel spreadsheets (some of these reports are just Excel spreadsheets that must be filled with data); so, I was thinking about making an application that could aggregate all the input models and generate all the outputs I need, at once. Any suggestions?"
"Here's the thing: it cannot be a web-based application (connectivity is a luxury at the rig), it has to run in a laptop (each employee should have it installed, stand-alone) and it must be able to import images from Excel worksheets. Crystal Reports uses spreadsheets as data sources, but it's not Open Source; I was thinking about using BIRT or JasperReports + POI, but that looks to me like inventing the wheel itself, so I decided to ask before digging into it."
it's super easy (Score:2, Funny)