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Integrate a GUI in a excel sheed

Alexander Eisenhuth stacom at stacom-software.de
Tue Feb 18 04:25:26 EST 2003 
Steve Holden schrieb:
> "Alexander Eisenhuth" <stacom at stacom-software.de> wrote in message
> news:3E512298.5020004 at stacom-software.de...
> 
>>P Brian schrieb:
>>
>>>May I ask why you would like to embed a GUI in Excel?
>>>
>>>If your application is primarily based around a spreadsheet, (ie a
> 
> helper
> 
>>>for accountants) but needs some extra info passed from the spreadsheet
> 
> into
> 
>>>python and back then excel already has a pretty good and easy GUI
> 
> toolkit.
> 
>>>No point in making life hard.
>>>
>>>If your application is not primarily a spreadsheet, then it might be
> 
> asked
> 
>>>why you want to use excel?
>>>
>>>What are you trying to do please?
>>
>>The application is inbetween a db and excel. The app. is extracting data
> 
> out of the db and processing it in a special way. The results are inserted
> in a excel spreadsheet and analysed by the user. (excel calculations, graphs
> , ...)
> 
>>To setup the "extraction logic" the userer needs a UI, which appearance is
> 
> quite dynamic. As i told, i want to create the UI-stuff in wxPython. So I
> could use a "setup-button", that creates a toplevel dialoge, but the entered
> informations must appear later in excel, so it would be nice if i can embed
> the whole dialoge in excel
> 
>>Because I must serve different versions of excel (97 ... xp) and must keep
> 
> the app. under configuration management (internationalisation, versioning)
> and have to hold the excel user data (excel calculations, graphs , ...) i
> want to make the dependencies to VBA as little as possible.
> 
>>If you think, the easier way to do this is in VBA, feel free to tell me
> 
> your thoughts.
> 
> 
> Seems to me that you need some way to indicate in the spreadsheet that you
> want to activate the UI. However, you might well find that if you try to run
> an MFC-based UI such as Excel as a part of the same process as a wxWindows
> interface, there may well be conflicts between them.
> 
> Are you planning to write a main program in Python and call Excel
> functionality using its COM interace? If so you need to experiment
> carefully. And I can't offhand think of another sensible way to do it.
> 
> Sorry if this doesn't help, but mixing GUI technologies is a frequent source
> of problems, and you do need to plan it carefully.
> 
My basic idea is to write a COM server in python and use the COM interface of excel to insert data. 

As I understand COM now, the objects seems to be in the same process. So you're right im running into problems, if I use it in the way I planned it. (MFC UI excel and wxPython UI COM server).

So it sounds to me, that I have 2 possib.:

1) If I would keep my idea (wx-UI) it sounds like i have to create a new process and do something with IP communication.

2) or write a MFC based UI (PythonWin) and embed it as active-x control


regards
Alexander
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