Re: Interactive Interface for Oracle ?

Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_exesolutions.com> wrote in message news:<3EA0A3C4.9434FE0_at_exesolutions.com>...  

> Your client's lack of a personal life not withstanding ... I don't believe there is a single bit of
> functionality in Excell that can't be found in all of the major report writing tools.
>
> And all without the ability for end-users to corrupt the data.

Now, if you let them do it in the database, that could very well be a bad thing!

The big point you are missing: There are many things that Excel can do to manipulate data, and _that is not a bad thing_. In fact, that is the point of spreadsheets, and why they became so popular 20 years ago (and some people have resented them as implemented since then, myself often included). People (originally financial types, then their secretaries, then everbody else) found they didn't have to rely on a bottlenecked IT department to do tasks that had not been previously defined. So PC's did to minicomputers what mini's did to mainframes: they separated out tasks that did not require a larger system. The plus and the minus were the same, viz., out of control of the formal information designers. The plus being they could get it done, the minus being they could go off on tangents or even counter to the IS department. And of course, it is a lot easier to make a pretty picture with your own computer, making a formal design team look slow and non-productive.

Now there is the portal backlash to integrate these things back into a communicative mode, which unfortunately is a long way from actually resolving this conflict, if indeed it ever can.

jg

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