MS Excel provides many powerful and flexible capabilities to design, manage, and analyze business data.  All too often however, MS Excel spreadsheets that are useful to a business get used by more and more people, they grow in features and complexity, and get copied, modified and emailed around.  Before you know it, the effort required to maintain the MS Excel application starts to exceed the business benefits.  When you reach the point when your MS Excel spreadsheets are out of control, it is time to think about migrating your Excel database application to a Microsoft .NET application.  Doing so will provide employees with repeatable business functions that improve the quality and consistency of your business data, and avoid all the control, versions, and security issues that ordinarily occur with managing large amount of business data with MS Excel. 

Converting Excel database spreadsheets to an MS .NET application provides a far more repeatable approach to manage business critical processes and data than does an Excel spreadsheet. Excel spreadsheets provide infinite flexibility, but at the cost of bad data, and the cost of managing a distributed application that is intended for just one or a few users. An MS .NET application supports well-structured data, and repeatable, high quality data and workflow processes. PCA can migrate your Excel spreadsheets to an MS .NET application, and make your Excel Application more structured, while preserving the original functional integrity of the your MS Excel spreadsheet

Converting your Excel spreadsheets to an MS .NET application provides a far more repeatable, scalable and secure approach to managing business critical data. Excel spreadsheets provide infinite flexibility, but at the cost of unmanageable data. An MS .NET application enables well-structured, highly constrained data, and a secure, role-based workflow processes. PCA can migrate your Excel spreadsheets to an MS .NET application, and make your Excel Application more structured, while preserving the original functional integrity of the your MS Excel spreadsheet.

	MS Excel	.NET Smart Client
Workflow	Email back-and-forth	Process-flow Defined
Concurrency	No (single user only)	Yes (multiple users)
Security	XLS password	Role-based privileges
Version Issues	Yes (file data stamp)	No
Audit-ability	Tedious (date and email comparisons)	Automatic (full audit trail)
Data Integrity	Low (somewhat constrained)	Highly constrained data
Data Capacity	Limited	Unlimited
Data Structures	Flat: 2-dimensions	Relational: 3-dimensions

Once an Excel application has been converted from an Excel spreadsheet to an MS .NET application, the data can still be exported, viewed and analyzed in MS Excel! But the data input, equations, and data manipulation become part of a structured, well defined database application, which provides for improved data entry consistency, improved versioning as new features get added, and generally easier, more straightforward user interfaces. Best of all, the data can be controlled in a secure way, and made available through role-based security over the Internet as a .NET Smart-Client application!

We frequently design .NET Smart-Client applications to import MS Excel data as well.   Using standardized MS Excel templates, we can devise a process to gather data in MS Excel spreadsheets, import the data into the MS .NET database application, and make the data automatically available to everyone, with no email!