Hi,

Firstly, I am not a developer or IT guy, but I do have an understanding of both and that is what has lead me to ask this question.

I'm currently working for a company that uses baan and part of my work is to take cost prices from baan and use them in excel to provide price quotations from clients.

The most time inefficient part of this process is when the staff manually query baan with a part number and then copy and paste that into the excel worksheet. This seems ludicrous to me, given the power and flexibility of excel.

So, my question is: would it be possible (in theory) to take a part number from the excel worksheet (let's say column A), open a session in baan and use that part number to query the database, find the cost in the table and then take that value and insert it into column B?

To me, it would seem like a pretty simple thing to be doing, but as I say, I am not the IT guy. This could potentially save us hours of work though and so if the theory is achievable then I can put forward a case to have this implemented.

Thanks for your help.

Yes - you can query baan from excel. Search the AFS/DDC/OLE Forum (http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/forumdisplay.php?f=59) on this board. Search for excel. Keep in mind I only tested this on 4c4 and assume this method would work for other versions. It is not the quickest method at returning data. It would require an IT person familiar with baan to write the queries and such. Not something I really recommend, but it should work.

For activities like this what we did was to create some reports out of baan. Then we just run those reports to the excel device and this device executes a macro to format the report. They the purchasing(or whichever department) can work with the spreadsheets.

Your understandin is correct . One can easily query database from excel and use it easily . You can check sample excel based trial balance dashboard (http://www.baanboard.com/node/2415).

You can also c many blogs on excel on my blog (http://www.baanboard.com/node/2415) which may also be useful to u.

These samples are for ms sql database . But one can change it for other db also through odbc connections.