I am engaged by a telco company sales team to develop a web application to replace their current workflow.
Their current workflow consists of many spreadsheets containing product, pricing, and sales data.
I have successfully done this, but they continuously want me to allow them to download certain data into excel files for them to view.
I appreciate why they want this because
a) sometimes they want a lot of data and pagination on the web app just does not work for them.
b) they have been so used to Excel and its functions that it is hard to wean them off it completely.
As a vendor, I want to marry the convenience of both Excel and a web application, that I ended up surfing for javascript frameworks that allow me to simulate an Excel software on the web app.
My web application is developed in CakePHP 2.4.2 using MySQL as the database.
I have narrowed down to 2 choices: dhtmlx and wijmo.
This web application is hosted within the company's intranet system.
The top Excel features I noticed the sales team is using:
- They want tabs
- They want to be able to see the formula bar so that they know why a figure is 1,789.45 for e.g.
- They want to be able to select a bunch of cells and then find out either the sum of the figures in the cells or the count.
- They want to be able to do sorting and filtering the way it is done in Excel with checkboxes. See the attached screenshot.
Although I have narrowed my choice to these 2 javascript libraries, I am open to other choices.
Another important thing is that the library must be as simple for a beginner me to write the application as possible.
