Business Critical Apps / MS Office

[FrogEater]

Hello,

I hope this is the good forum for such question.

Here we go, in the company I'm working for, the apps rated are "Critical/core business" is running as Excel workbook with VBA macros.

Despite our explainations about diverses risks encoutered (availabilty, open code, no tracking, Excel not designed for such apps), we're struggling to get the decision of replacing it.
No need to say that dev norms aren't known in these thinggy, nor documentation or knowledge transfer.

So here are my questions:
What points could you advice me to raise to get these sheets to be replaced by serious stuffs ?
Or even article I could use to ake my points.

Thanks,
Chris

 

[jrbarnett]

Is the data stored in the Excel apps, or is Excel used as a front end to a database?

John

 

[FrogEater]

Everything's excel (mainly to workaround strict access policy to DB prod servers).
If an app is well-develop and using DB and so on, output is used to be imported into these excel thinggys.

 

[jrbarnett]

OK Here goes:

1. Excel has no transaction control, unlike an RDBMS such as SQL Server, MySQL.

2. Scalability - Proper SQL databases can handle loads far larger than the amount of memory in the server;
Excel has a limit in size of sheets per workbook and cells per worksheet which is a fraction of the capacity of a proper database server.

3. DB servers support referential integrity to enforce data integrity between tables; with Excel this needs a lot of custom VBA to enforce. Doing so across spreadsheets is even more complex.

4. Exporting data from a SQL database to import it into an Excel sheet contravenes best practise (normalisation) and introduces data duplication - which is the most up to date etc?

5. Data security - can the excel files be copied to USB sticks, CDs or DVDs? Has the data been locked out so that it can't easily be accessed? Password protected VBA code?
etc.
Bear in mind when writing up your details to include any legal requirements for data protection and storage that your business operates in.

Hope this gives you some sort if idea.

John