Hi guys,

I hope this is the correct forum I'm using, I am not looking for any help, just a bit of input.

I am busy working with an extremely lengthy cartridge list of 128 items against possibly 27 different suppliers on an excel spreadsheet. This happens on a monthly basis which does not make it easy to my eyes. Aside from that I've to also highlight the lowest price amongst each item. This is where my mind was doing a bit of traveling into the programming world.

I was thinking it would be a really cool way to make my life a little easier. I thought I create a program that could help me with the spreadsheet itself and the sorting as well. Now what I wanted to know is when we inputting or outputting a file, does that file have to be of a format .dat. Can it not be any other format? Do you think the compiler would not read other file formats?

My thoughts were, input the data (prices) onto an excel spreadsheet and then the program basically will highlight, not sort, the lowest price of each item, so the supplier with the lowest price gets the order. Then the output will be the highlighted information.

Another thing, there is a term we use in purchasing called "benchmarking". It does not have the same meaning as in networking and project management. I was thinking benchmark sorting, a new kind of sorting. What do you think?

well.. excel probably has all of the functionality you need built in. If not, working with excel macro's would probably be your next best bet since a macro can deal with the data in context of the spread sheet.

A compiler really wants as little to do with an excel spreadsheet as it can get. Compilers like source code -- not spreadsheets. A compiler transforms computer source code into an executable format -- it does not do data processing etc.

However you can write a program to deal with data in just about any format you want. Though it is often best to get the data into a simple format so that your program does not have to do a lot of processing to get at the data.


As for benchmarking -- anything that allows you to compare elements (i.e. a relation exists) then you can use it to form a directed hierarchy (a sorting) -- not all sorting are linear, for example in a lattice you can have two elements which are not directly comparable but they may both be comparable to another element. -- anyway I am rambling -- my point is, sure you can probably make a sorting algorithm.