I am in the early design stages of an Excel application that needs a
database back end. The Excel front is primarily due to client
preferences (oh, how they love Excel) and the many
spreadsheet-appropriate calculations, manipulations, and graphing that
will be done with the data within the application. Using Access to hold
the data has been our solution in the past and since I am actually being
given the opportunity to suggest alternatives this round, I am hoping I
can use PostgreSQL instead and use this as one first step toward knowing
how to develop a non-ms bound solution to these types of "spreadsheet
models" we are often being asked to develop (discussion of alternate
front ends is a topic for a different time!).
So, given that, what I am asking here is simply for some advice from
users who have done this - link PostgreSQL data into Excel - on what
solutions tend to work best. The ones I know about now involve ODBC
(looks very well supported on the PostgreSQL end), ADO (have used this
with Access) and ADO.Net (haven't used this, but wonder if it might be
worthwhile looking at for future compatibility with Office 2007...ugh).
My application will need to pull from and write back to the database
frequently, the database will be stored locally on the computer running
the application, it will need to be fairly easy for clients to install.
Thanks so much for your thoughts!
~Kelly
--
Kelly Close
Hydrosphere Resource Consultants, Inc.
1002 Walnut, Ste 200
Boulder, CO 80302
(303) 443-7839
http://www.hydrosphere.com