On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 03:22:12PM -0500, Skip Evans wrote: > Hey all, > > I'm inheriting a project that was unsuccessfully off-shored > and is now in such bad shape (I've seen the code. It's awful) > that they are firing the off-shore company and starting over. > > One of the things the other company said was possible, and I'm > not familiar with... if I understand correctly, is to create a > CD with not just an Excel spreadsheet, but software on that CD > that when placed in another computer will open the > spreadsheet, allow it to be modified and rewritten back to the CD. > > This is part of the requirements. > > Does anyone know of such software and its name? Maybe offshore, but not here. There are only two possibilities. First include a copy of Excel on the CD and somehow make it autorun. Yeah, Microsoft would *love* that. Second, include some other program which would do the same thing. Good luck with that. And now the kicker-- write the spreadsheet back to CD. Okay, maybe, if it's a CD-RW. But who's going to pay attention to that little detail? And as far as I know, writing to a CD is far more complicated than writing to a hard drive. You can't overwrite data on a CD-RW. Once written, it's written. You have to cover up the section that was written to (in software), and then write the contents again. Eventually, you'll run out of room. And it almost necessitates having a copy of some CD-writing software on the CD, since there may not be such software on the client machine. And all this assumes the user is running Windows. The binaries for one OS won't run on a different OS. Now, watch. Someone will get on and say, "Oh sure, you can do that with such-and-such software. I did it the other day." In which case, just forget I said anything. ;-} Paul -- Paul M. Foster -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
