I'm wondering whether any of the PB experts here have ever considered trying to do a product that does what DW2XLS does, but better? I expect you’re familiar with it, but in case you aren’t, it’s at http://desta.com.ua/dw2xls/ - it exports DWs to nicely formatted XLS representations.
Unfortunately, it is pretty imperfect for at all complex DWs, and although there is some evidence that they are doing minimal maintenance on it, they have pretty much stopped answering support questions on it, and the last responses I got to problems I raised were along the lines of “sorry, we aren’t going to fix that”.
I really think there might be quite a good market among PB programmers for a product that did this well and was being maintained to fix problems. It would have to deal with a lot of complexity obviously, because of the way you can use expressions for so many DW properties – which is where DW2XLS tends to fall down.
Maybe they’d even sell the product to someone as a starting point. (That’s just a hope – no special reason to assume it’s true, given I can’t even get them to answer any emails recently.)
I for one would contribute to a crowd-sourcing campaign to fund development of a good product for this! I really need it for the PB applications I sell (including a bookkeeping program), and get a lot of complaints about the imperfections in the existing exporting to formatted Excel that I do with DW2XLS.
