A lot of data currently resides in a number of Excel sheets.
Rough estimate 100 rows x 80 columns, across 3-5 spreadsheets. A lot of data repeated.

I feel like the data would be more easily accessed and manipulated if it were to reside in a database with some sort of companion application.

What, in your opinion, would be the cost and deadline for something like this if you were to pay someone else?
Would you, in your opinion, develop this in house?
Would you even develop this at all?
ISO opinions.

I guess it would depend on who asked for it. I mean, it's not that much data, but if a director is crying for it to have a web front end...

If you've already got a small database in existence, why not add a few tables to hold this data? We would do this in house, we've got two great SQL admins, and two great web programmers who could probably whip this up (along with queries) after about ~20-24 man hours. But that's with the infrastructure already in place.

Thank. That helps me put the project into context.

No current infrastructure aand it would basically be me doing everything.

sounds pretty simple to move it into the db. just import it into a database (dont need to write a custom app), run a few sql for any cleanup to remove duplicate data.

as for the front end, django has built in CRUD. could whip up something basic with very little code if you know what you're doing.

the downside of these projects is they never end. as soon as you give users a better view, they'll bug you for features and support. personally, i'd leave it in excel and let them user filters / charts, write macros / pivot tables and whatnot.

This post was edited by carteblanche on Aug 4 2016 05:29pm

This is what I was thinking as well. There is another factor that I have to consider. I'm only an intern and my time is ending soon.

Honestly, this could be done in a couple days wit like a python or perl script. Just use excel to export as CSV, use a script to parse the CSV and insert into database.

If this is something you want to try doing yourself I would start looking into RegEx's

FYI, that is not remotely near being a lot. Meaning that

this is key. perhaps providing them a simple interface in Excel where they have control would be better

Honestly, just get your hands on Microsoft Access and see how far it takes you. You have too much data for an Excel file, but using actual databases for this is serious overkill.

Not much data in my opinion.

I agree.

100 rows is like nothing. you could type those in an hour.
80 columns sounds like a lot but it is not.

The only thing 80 columns does, is raising an anti-pattern" alert. In this case there is probably data in each row that could be moved to a separate dataset. one would want to do this to minimize redundancy and improve maintenance quality.

I think that a very important aspect of automation is in analyzing the process.

Instead of thinking bout migrating your project (excel spreadhseet ) to another system, try to find out what people are trying to do, and how you could simplify the process.
Sometimes the usage of spreadsheets can be left out altogether.

And programming an application is easy. Telling what the program should do is a lot harder. You should be able to roughly estimate how long it will take, If you cannot, you might want to gain more insight on the process, before proposing to migrate.