I am trying to learn web development and my plan for filling my portfolio is to do projects at work to make my life easier. Currently I am incharge of our VOIP system and part of my job is to run reports on phone usage by our sales people. Now when I say run, I really mean have the phone company run the reports. They e-mail them to me and I e-mail them out to the executives to review. Our phone company sends them in html format (it is my believe they use some form of PHP to generate the report). It imports nicely into Excel, but I don't bother doing that. So one of the projects I want to work on is making all that information searchable and allow the executives to run reports. Currently I get a monthly report with all the sales people, but my goal is to make it possible to run a report on a single sales person based on the information currently in the system. Then export it as an excel spreadsheet or pdf.
Now the second project I plan to work on involves a report I format everyday. Basically, it's a text file from our unix box delimited by | with backorders from the day before. I filter the data, then place each type on a different sheet, and then deleted the original data. It works out that I get about 10 sheets in the workbook and takes about 20 to 30 minutes of my morning to do. I also then take data from one sheet and place it in another workbook for analysis on that type of backorder for the month. Now my plan here is to automate that so I only have to place the text file on the server and then it will generate the report in html.
At this time I get to the point as to why I love the internet. As I've been working on this project I have thought about trying to make the html look (and perhaps function) like Excel. The executives just double click the file and don't know what it opens in anyway, but they will notice when it doesn't look like Excel. So I did some searching and I actually found some code to do exactly what I wanted!
dhtmlxGrid - Ajax-enabled DHTML grid with rich Javascript API
There are a couple of reasons I am doing this. One, because I need a way to build up my portfolio. But the other reason is the company isn't using the data it can to the fullest. Now I might run a back order report everyday, but they never compare the data beyond perhaps to the data for that week. I can see it being very useful for the company to say compare the number from this month to last month. The other thing is I know eventually, they will probably ask for a report from this certain week or certain day. How nice if I can setup a simple search that will pull the data automatically for them. No the big decision is whether I put the data in the MySQL, which I think I will have to do.
