However, occasionally,
you??™ll still need to interact directly with applications running on Microsoft Windows
systems, which can be difficult, since Microsoft Office programs have proprietary, relatively
closed formats.
In this chapter, we??™ll look at some ways to create reports with Ruby and Microsoft
Office programs, and then work through an example of producing a web-based system
that sends its data to an Access database.
Interacting with Microsoft Office
Microsoft Excel, Word, and Access are familiar to many users. Managers and other businesspeople
are trained to manipulate data in Excel, and letting them use Excel as an
input format gives them a great deal more power. In fact, you may not even get a choice
whether to use Excel, since it may be already deeply ingrained in the business model or
directly supplied to you by vendors. Microsoft Word is typically the word processor of
choice for organizations of all types. Microsoft Access is also a convenient platform. End
users can use data from Access to import data into Word and Excel; mail merges, for
example, are often done using data from Access.
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