Rapid Application Development / Advanced Excel Development

Spreadsheet Development

There are many reasons for solving a business issue with a spreadsheet based system. There are also some serious consequences of choosing the wrong technology (and methodology) for a particular scenario. A discussion of the Codematic view is in the paper Simon presented to the Eusprig conference in 2005. Where cost and speed of initial release are key, spreadsheets are pretty much unbeatable. If maintainability, auditability and robustness are key, then spreadsheets may not offer the best technology choice.

Spreadsheet Design and Development Best Practice Series

Powerpoint presentation on Spreadsheet Design Best Practice is here.

Spreadsheet development is not just about the technology, but also about the development methodology (or lack of). Many mainstream ideas do not translate well to spreadsheet development. Many spreadsheet developers barely have a methodical approach, never mind applying a recognisable, proven development methodology. Many spreadsheet developers do not have formal training and/or qualifications in software development, we do and find the knowledge very useful indeed.

If you need a high quality, robust, flexible spreadsheet based system developing then please contact us.

Simon takes the lead developer role on all projects, and generally does most of the development too, occasionally we call on our trusted team of sub-contractors, but we manage that internally.

Our work can go from pure formula based workbooks, through simple VBA automation of a labour intensive process, through custom worksheet functions (UDFs), VBA, COM and automation add-ins, up to full scale n-tier enterprise systems that use Excel purely as one version of the presentation layer, with perhaps an alternative web front end.

We have written standalone executables that interact with Excel, COM DLLs to connect to other resources, native XLLs for performance, .net assemblies, and of course loads of VBA for all manner of things. The technology choice is yours.

It's possible that using Codematic for developing simple spreadsheets will not prove cost effective, but for anything non trivial our wealth of experience will show through. Research indicates that good developers are around 28 times more productive than poor ones, and around 10 times more productive than the average - worth considering when comparing day rates.

We can also offer testing services to other spreadsheet developers using our library of hundreds of unique spreadsheets. We can also help with configuration testing and deployment testing.

If you require any more information please get in touch.