Opening other applications from within Revolution

[Mathewson]

Maybe I'm a bit stupid - but this seems rather redundant;
unless one is building a sort of TaskBar with RR.

What is much more interesting, to my mind, is the ability
of RR stacks to import data from documents/files generated
by other applications (cf RR's database capabilities),
process it, and, if necessary, export the processed data in
a form that the parent program of the originating
document/file can read.  This is a way that the "small man"
can access data in files generated by hugely expensive
proprietary applications for the price of, for example,
DreamCard.

Now, far be it for me to 'rubbish' Microsoft products
(cough, cough), but it is a well-known fact that Microsoft
and its software products dominate the computer world -
with the extremely undesirable result that a very large
part of the world depends on pirate software to get its
business done. As a person who is not over-enamoured of
either Microsoft products or pirate software, and
understands that full-blown Open-Source equivalents (cf.
Open Office) take years of effort, it seems to me that
there might be quite a niche for RR-developed programs to
access (um; MS Access is one of the cases in point)
proprietary formats quickly and inexpensively.

During my Masters degree course at the University of
Abertay (breath in a moment here) the programming
instructor taught us extremely simple stuff with Visual
Basic (why Abertay claimed that those who finished the MSc
in Computers and IT would be at an equivalent level to
those who had completed a 4-year undergraduate course I
will never know) - one of the programming exercises was to
build a front-end to retrieve information from a MS Access
file. The main thing I learnt during that course was that
Visual Basic was incredibly clunky compared with RR - and
that almost everything that VB could do, RR could do at
least as well if not slighty better. It was never explained
to us how learning to write a program that displayed seven
varieties of cars in a showroom would equip us for the real
world of computer programming (especially as I remember
doing real number-crunching stuff with Fortran in 1976 at a
school); in fact nothing was either justified or
rationalised - so I drew my own conclusion, which was that
the underpinnings of MS Office and so on being VB (or VBA)
should mean that it would be relatively easy to write RR
equivalents of all those VB exercises that opened Excel
docs, etc without all the rather odd, old-fashioned legacy
stuff that seemed to be built into VB + (of course) the
platform dependency which MetaCard managed to get beyond
when it took on the Hypercard platform dependency problem.

Having written this I will now try to find a spot of time
to run up a sweet little number to extract data from an
Excel file - and, as usual, I expect I'm a bit late in the
race and some fiendishly clever RR/MC maven has managed
this already!

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson

PS. Just poked my nose into a Microsoft website:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jan06/01-10Macworld2006PR.mspx

where I read something about Open XML - obviously nobody is
going to have to work too hard if data is really stored in
open XML (rather than xml + some funny encryption).
__________________________________________________
See Mathewson's software at:

http://members.maclaunch.com/richmond/default.html
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