Can this be done with VBA (MS Great Plains)

I am currently trying to find a way to make it easier to create service tickets within Great Plains. I am doing an internship at a small company that uses...less than efficient methods for general business procedures, at least in my opinion.

As of now a sales person within the company will generate a document called "request for service." This documents contains lists of inventory required for the install, company name, address, sales person ID, etc. This document is in excel format.

All of this information has to be reentered into the ticket fields by the service department and it is a massive time sink to do this. It is basically recopying information that already exists in the request for service document. Often times information is entered with typos and other errors as the service department employees are not exactly the most accurate typers. Now what I am trying to do is find a way to fill the fields on their screen from this document (request for service).

I would like to know if it is possible to use VBA editor within MS Great Plains to fill the service ticket fields in GP with information from the excel file or maybe even an infopath form.

I would like to just fill the fields and not have information submitted directly to the database from the excel/infopath document. I dont know if a button can be created that reads the data from the file and applies it to fields or not.

Any information on this type of integration would be appreciated.

Thanks.

This forum is for VB, a programming tool.

If you want to ask about VBA scripting the closest thing here might be the Office forum.

Since few people here probably use your particular VBA host, we'd have a hard time of giving you a specific answer. What you ask seems likely enough but we'd have no way to know what object model this host exposes to its embedded VBA engine, or what can be accomplished through it.

JFlynn

What is MS Great Plains?

EDIT:
Scratch that .. found out about it in Wiki.

As dilettante noted, this is a forum for VB6.

If you are contemplating using VB6, perhaps your app
could "read" the "Excel file", and then pre-populate a
service department form with that info.

They could then add info to that form as needed.

Spoo

I never heard of it either, but the Wiki that Spoo mentions indicates it uses SQL Server, so that sounds like what should used to store your data.

Once in the database, a simply query could be written to output it to a word document or excel spreadsheet with little typing involved.

That is all theory of course...I have no way to actually test it.

Thanks. I am more interested in pushing info INTO the program than taking it out. It is extremely frustrating because this program by Microsoft is extremely proprietary to the point of not even having information floating around on the web. It isn't that there is none, it is just that any free community forums that I can find relating to Great Plains seem to be inactive and all my posts thus far have remained unanswered. I received great help and quick replies on these forums awhile back and as expected I have at least gotten replies which pleases me :D

I would like to thank you guys for at least looking into my issue. Does anyone know of a good forum relating to VB scripting that I might find some answers?

It's an accounting, payroll, etc. package for small businesses from a company that Microsoft bought out something like 8 years ago. I'm surprised you haven't heard of it, but not surprised few people know much detail about it.

Be careful what you ask for: VB (as in VB6, not the pretender VB.Net) is one thing, VBScript is another thing, and VBA is yet another. VB creates stand-alone programs, while the other two are hosted in some other program like Word, etc. and are used for creating macros.

VB.Net came a long later and is somewhat similar but not compatible with the programming language syntax used by the other 3 things.


What you really want is a Great Plains forum site. General VBA is... well, general. Most people there will be talking about Office programs, and thus the important things you need will be unknown there as well.

This should be a good one:

http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=632

Note that Tek-Tips is for professionals, and they strongly frown on hobby plinkers. Doesn't mean 90% of their members aren't kiddies though.

Plinkers

A new one on me.. a great crossword word.
(sorry, couldn't resist)

Spoo

I was thinking of one who shoots at random targets in an informal and noncompetitive manner. Like a kid with a BB gun and a row of tin cans.

Quote:

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I would like to know if it is possible to use VBA editor within MS Great Plains to fill the service ticket fields in GP with information from the excel file

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this should be pretty easy to test, and certainly, i would assume it is possible, not much point having VBA if something as simple as this could not be done
if the ide has intellisense, just start typing (application.) then look down the list to find appropriate objects, or check out the object browser