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1. Suggest you check MIDRANGE-L archives. There is a wealth of information on people transferring data from AS/400 reports to EXCEL, that is independent of BPCS ... it can be done with ANY reports. If you cannot find it there, perhaps I can dig it up ... there was an article about how to put SQL/400 inside of Microsoft Excel Macros so that at the time of opening an Excel, it grabs the latest data out of BPCS or whatever your AS/400 application source is.

2. Suggest you take a look at the CUSTOM options of Ops Nav setup. If it is installed with all the DEFAULT options, all you get is Operations Management type stuff ... spool files, jobs, performance etc. But through Custom install, there is a wealth of additional programmer tools and direct access to DB/2, which adds to security headaches depending on your version of BPCS. This way you can go direct between 400 and other computing world. I was just at an IBM seminar about this, not yet digested my notes or pursued the urls handed out at it. Remind me in a month or so, and perhaps I will have a better answer for you.

There's a way to do this with Client Access, which I have not encouraged exploring at our site, because we are on a version of BPCS with obsolete security settings. We need to do the BPCS security upgrade. i studied it and figured the best solution was to buy the security upgrade package, but management has not approved the purchase. Thus I try not to encourage co-workers to go into the areas that give them the capability of trashing BPCS.

3. I operate in an environment where management wants us to get the biggest bang for the buck ... what can we get out of the NATIVE tools. What I have been doing is making what I call EXCEL FRIENDLY REPORTS ... modifying the output on the 400 to just have the data the EXCEL person wants, and eliminating control breaks so that the control break data is repeated all the way down the columns. I then use Ops Nav Windows short cut on PC desk top (a technique I learned from Rob on MIDRANGE-L) to get the modified report from spool to PC desk top folder, then from there to e-mail to the EXCEL person who uses Visual Basic to combine multiple EXCEL columns for his final objectives.

I guess I send reports from BPCS to my end users by this means on the average of 2 reports a week, with occasional spikes in volume. A few years ago our auditors would tell us in advance what reports they needed to see. We would e-mail them those reports in advance of their visit. There are a bunch of reports I run in association with end fiscal, where certain people get their end fiscal info in this form.

The commodities challenge that I recently asked about ... looks like we will be sending our customers a monthly spreadsheet listing the items we shipped them last month (BPCS sales quantity totals for last month), how much copper is in there (derived from BPCS BOM and a new file for Guage conversion), multiply the increase in copper price from base quote.

Currently my report is page break by customer, which is not EXCEL friendly, and I also have another version that is EXCEL friendly. It is not yet finalized what we will be doing, but I expect this will go into EXCEL and have some other massaging going on before it gets split by Visual Basic into separate attachment for each customer.

Does anyone know of an inexpensive way to convert a BPCS report to an EXCEL
spreadsheet ? Don't get enough requests to invest in expensive software but
every time someone requests it, it's a challenge. Any recommendations would
be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Dennis Basiner
Information Systems Manager
Cains Foods L.P.



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