Hi everyone, I thought I would give this forum a second go. Even if I answer my own questions again, hopefully it might help someone else. I work mostly in computer vision, and thus my language experience didn't include VB until about month ago (though I think I'm learning fast), when I was co-opted to help my lab move.

I was wondering what the best practices/plan/logic flow would be for the following problem:
  1. taking data that is in SQLServer with multiple tables, do a one time migration to an Excel Spreadsheet [I know this is soo backwards]
  2. create a daily form sheet (in Excel) where a user can input several manual readings (thinking of these as global variables) [coming from analog readings...I may try to automate that later]
  3. create a user-specific report based the newly entered global values and user-based variables/constants [currently about 60 users, user variables include things like distance multipliers]
  4. send all the users their user specific email, preferably in the body of the email (I just got some of these guys off faxes, don't want to teach them to read a .csv file)


My first thought when given this project was to handle it all in SQL (where I'm comfortable), or do a port/C++ ODBC . Boss man wants it all in Excel, in an macro. I don't feel like that's the best way to do this, but he seems to hate updating the original database, and so he just want to "put everything in Excel and push a button." In case you are wondering, not only did I not design the original database, I haven't even used it before today.

Going into my first thoughts as I try map out a plan:
I was going to put each of the tables [users, locations, etc] into it's own sheet. Would it be better if it was it's own file? Then I will make another sheet for the for the daily readings to be plugged in. And finally have a button to run a monstrously large (perhaps I don't have perspective yet) macro.

Where would the best place to store each user report be? Make an CSV file? Keep it in memory until it's sent to Outlook then dump it in a loop? Boss man uses Outlook, but I may not have to use it. Assuming that I do end up using Outlook, if I use .send in a loop, he won't actually have to click send or anything to have the reports mailed to the users? That was my understanding, but most of the examples I saw included a .display line (which I assume I can just leave out).

Thanks in advance for your input, and cheers to you all who do this all year long. I'd hate it.