It can. Costs a bit, but it probably costs less than writing your own interface to Excel. To do that, you need Excel installed on the web server, then you need to know the VBA API for that particular version of Excel ( Microsoft change it every version for fun), then you have to code for concurrency, etc. It's going to take a great deal of time, be limited ( graphs over the web are very difficult at best), and it'll be very, very, very slow! On the other hand, installing Google Apps ( or some other solution) would let you piggyback off the programming and quality assurance software testing effort somebody else has already done, and give your client a more robust solution.
Take my advice with a grain of salt, but I tend to freak out at the thought of charging a lot for a project with a very high risk of failure. Sorry to sound blunt - as a programmer, this isn't something I'd want to take on! |
