Getting your grips on Excel chaos

Getting Your Grips
on Excel Chaos
Niels de Bruijn, Business Unit Manager APEX
San Antonio, 27-JUN-2017

2
Facts & Figures
Independent Technology House
with Cross-Industry Expertise
Headquarter
Ratingen
(North Rhine – Westphalia)
260
employed
Founded
1994
Branches
Dortmund, Cologne,
Frankfurt am Main
Top Company
for Trainees &
Students
Privately-
Owned
Corporation
Oracle
Platinum
Partner
28 Mio. Euro
Revenue
Getting Your Grips on Excel Chaos

3
About me
§ Niels de Bruijn, Business Unit Manager APEX
§ Born in 1977, married, three daughters, living in Ratingen
§ Working for MT AG since DEC-2003
§ After working for 2 years as Oracle consultant for Oracle Nederland B.V.
§ Track record with APEX since its inception
§ Responsible for all APEX activity in the company
§ Knowledge Portal: apex.mt-ag.com
§ Presenting at Kscope, DOAG Conference, APEX Connect and Open World amongst others
§ ODTUG - Part of APEX Content Committee for Kscope
§ DOAG – Initiator & Conference Chair of APEX Connect

4
Agenda
§ When to migrate
§ Moving your data to Oracle
§ Replacing the Excel frontend

5
Typical usage scenarios for Excel
§ Listing of data
§ Project planning
§ Controlling
§ Management System
§ Management Reporting

6
When it is becoming a nightmare...
§ when the creator leaves the company and no documentation exists
§ when Excel becomes part of daily business processes, operated by different
user groups throughout the organization
§ when multiple excel files are linked up, maybe even syncing data with Access
or other data sources
§ when business logic is implemented using VBA and/or macros
§ when the Excel file gets too big
§ when multiple versions of Excel files are flying around and are sent by e-mail

7
General issues with Excel
§ No scalability
§ Poor security features
§ Data redundancy
§ No multi developer environment
§ No multi user environment
§ Data quality issues
§ No option for integration

8
Example - Travel Expenses

9
Example - Travel Expenses

10
Example: Translation Management

11
Example: Translation Management
Get it here: https://apex.mt-ag.com/translation_management_system

12
Agenda
§ When to migrate

13
Moving your data to Oracle
§ Things to consider...
§ Option 1: don‘t migrate
§ Option 2: Upload CSVs through using the native APEX Wizard
§ Option 3: excel2collection Plugin
§ Other Options

14
Things to consider...
§ Is it a valid use case for data migration?
§ Data quality can be very poor in Excel!
§ Migrating data can be very time-consuming
§ First import your data 1:1 into staging tables
§ Clean up the data and transfer it to the final data model using PL/SQL
PL/SQL
Staging Tables ERD
Import 1:1

15
Option 1: don‘t migrate
§ Leave the mess in Excel and just import the master data* of it
§ Start entering your transactional data through your new shiny APEX interface
*) Master Data being „Countries Table“, „Currencies Table“, etc.

16
Option 2: upload CSVs using the native APEX wizard
§ Works best for small data sets
§ Can be cumbersome
for many tables
§ CSV is not aware of data types
§ See Packaged App
„Sample Data Loading“

17
Option 3: excel2collection Plugin
§ Supports all common file types CSV, XLS and XLSX
§ First 48 columns are imported, because data is stored into an APEX collection
§ See: http://www.apex-plugin.com/oracle-apex-plugins/process-type-
plugin/excel2collections_271.html

18
Other Options
§ Use SQL Loader to import CSV
§ SQL Developer (http://www.thatjeffsmith.com/archive/2012/04/how-to-
import-from-excel-to-oracle-with-sql-developer/)
§ Using „External Tables“ in Oracle Database
§ Apache POI: https://chrisonoracle.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/read-excel-file-
in-plsql-using-java-in-the-db/
§ Alternative with support: Opal:XE (http://www.opal-
consulting.de/site/products/opal-xe)

19
Agenda
§ When to migrate

20
Replacing the Excel frontend
§ Native components in APEX 5.1.x
§ Handsontable
§ SmartPivot

21
Native components in APEX 5.1.x
§ Single Row Update (SRU) Form
§ The best way to operate on a single table row
§ Charts
§ SQL Report
§ Good choice for custom formatting your (readonly) report and no Interactive
Reports features are needed

22
§ Interactive Report
§ Still my no.1 choice when no data entry is required
§ Interactive Grid (IG)
§ Great for data entry of multiple rows on the same page, but....
§ Lacking some typical Excel features
(copy-down, copy/paste, vertical headers, drill-down headers, auto-width, etc.)
§ Time consuming customization done through JavaScript
§ No official API doc available (see blog posts of John Snyders / forum.oracleapex.com)
§ Multiple IGs on one page will slow down page load

23
§ Example Migration from Excel to Interactive Report

24
Example of IG Customization
§ Copy Down Feature
§ See message 14239787 on forum.oracleapex.com

25
§ Handsontable
§ SmartPivot

26
Handsontable
“Handsontable is a composite spreadsheet component for apps and websites. It is written in
JavaScript and not constrained by any external framework. It can be easily modified or extended
with custom plugins. It also binds to any source using the JSON format and handles large
amounts of data. You can easily do all CRUD operations and provide end-users with an Excel-like
experience.”
- docs.handsontable.com

27
Handsontable
§ Offers some more features compared to IG (copy/paste of data)
§ Data binding doesn‘t come out-of-the-box
§ apex.server.process calls needed to process the data
§ Requires licenses

28
Handsontable

29
§ Handsontable
§ SmartPivot

30
SmartPivot
§ apexsmartpivot.com
§ Management Reporting (no data entry possible)
§ APEX Plugin
§ Based on JS library webpivottables
§ All data is first downloaded before it can be analyzed
§ Requires license
§ Light-weight alternative without support:
http://ora-00001.blogspot.de/2013/10/pivot-table-plugin-for-apex.html

31
SmartPivot

32
Summary
§ What benefit(s) do you get from migrating Excel to APEX?
§ Remember: Excel != APEX (Client-Tool vs. Webapp)
§ Evaluate if data migration of your Excel data is necessary
§ Data Quality/Redundancy is mostly an issue in Excel
§ Stick with standard APEX components/features whenever possible

Q&A
@nielsdb
http://de.linkedin.com/in/nielsdebruijn
www.xing.com/profile/Niels_deBruijn
http://blog.mt-ag.com/apex

Getting your grips on Excel chaos

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