my blog. for you.

Reden wir über Digitales.

Ich bin selbständiger IT Berater und Unternehmer in der Internet und Software Branche. Ich beschäftige mich mit Design, Enterprise Applikationen, Web Apps und SaaS Produkten. Ich entwerfe und entwickle Business Lösungen und Anwendungen. Ich helfe Unternehmen in Sachen Software Qualität und Wissenstransfer, z.B. mit Angular und Spring Boot.

PivotHelper: Generate Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts from CSV and Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet Files

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.Somewhat recently, I regularly had to generate Pivot tables and corresponding charts from datasets provided as both CSV and Microsoft Excel files. Now, with its data source and pivot table tools Microsoft Excel usually lends itself to that sort of task. However, to completely automate this task VBA macros are required. Those too work quite nicely if one overcomes the initial aversion of working with Microsoft's not exactly well-designed and usable IDE for VBA macros ... Read more

Dan Bricklin – Inventor of the Electronic Spreadsheet

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.Today startup entrepreneurs are celebrated for disrupting industries and changing the world. Marc Andreessen is famously quoted with the statement "Software is eating the world!". Back in the days when software was nothing but a nascent industry, Dan Bricklin both changed the world with software, disrupted not one industry but several at the same time and in fact almost single-handedly created the industry of small business software. His name nowadays isn't exactly well known as ... Read more

Exporting table data in web applications as CSV or Excel files

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.In business applications being able to export data to Microsoft Excel is a very common requirement. In most business environments Excel is the go-to tool for business analytics and quick-and-easy data processing. Hence, being able to communicate with Excel is an essential feature for most kinds of business software. The usual approach for meeting that requirement is generating a CSV file on the server. However, while simple this approach can come with a few downsides: While ... Read more

Airtable – A true spreadsheet / database hybrid?

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.Lots of the software of the world is written in Microsoft's Excel. A spreadsheet environment lends itself particularly well to addressing everyday computing problems. Compiling tabular data, creating connections between particular pieces of that data, condensing and aggregating over a dataset's values. These are common tasks a spreadsheet solves very well with no need for complex database or application server software. A spreadsheet is a flexible tool that provides simple, responsive and instant feedback to ... Read more

Self Licking Ice Cream Cones

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.Chris Granger of LightTable fame has posted an insightful article on how better programming tools might come about. He argues that 'programming should be about solving problems' and that ideally 'programming is our way of encoding thought such that the computer can help us with it' but along the way we - as programmers - somehow lost these notions and in our daily work we predominantly deal with marginal problems, problems which are incidental to ... Read more

The World Runs On Excel

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.There's been a lot of talk lately about the importance of Excel and that Excel is everywhere. I'd even go as far as saying that most of the world in one way or another runs on Excel. Excel in my opinion is the best piece of software Microsoft has made so far (other people seem to agree with me, by the way). While Microsoft didn't invent the spreadsheet - that credit goes to VisiCalc and ... Read more