On Thu, 2009-05-14 at 16:50 -0400, Paul M Foster wrote: > 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 > I've never heard of anything like that, there are so many unknown variables that I would really feel for the poor team who had to take that project on! You could do it with a USB drive and a small Linux distro that was set to run as a boot disk though, and it could do a whole lot more than just open a spreadsheet up! Ash www.ashleysheridan.co.uk -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
