Summary
Important Observations
- Integrating the application with desktop tools such as Excel adds real business value to the 5250 application because it provides new information and capabilities to the application users - unlike, for example, a drop down, which adds very little real business value to a 5250 application.
- This feature allows you to easily leverage the power of MS-Excel. Once a user has information in MS-Excel they can do what they please with it – draw graphs and charts, produce pivot tables, save it to their hard drive, print it, send it vie e-mail to others. MS-Excel provides a gateway for using valuable information locked up in your IBM i data base. MS-Excel is also a great springboard for generic reporting activities.
- The spreadsheet data extraction is implemented by software developers - rather than by end users with ad-hoc tools - so more it is more secure and its performance has been verified.
What You Should Know
- How to create a command handler that sends data for all or selected instance list entries to MS Excel.