Best way of coding a new project

[envy me]

I need to create an application which does the following:

A form will need to be filled out by a user (whether be it html or VB)
Once the form is created, the user will submit it, which in turn will do the following:

1) create a spreadsheet with the results of the form (formatted to make it look professional)

and

2) email this spreadsheet to someone (or at the least open up outlook with the spreadsheet as an attachment, and the to, and subject fields filled in)


I do not beleive this is a very complex... The confusion will arise by creating the actual spreadsheet from data stored in variables, and from actually sending the email or opening up outlook with fields filled in.

This application MUST be able to run on any PCs connected to company network and may NOT use SMTP servers or any type of serverside code i.e. ASP (it must be independant of any webserver)


I am fairly comfortable with coding and outline of my project in VB, however I would prefer to use HTML to avoid hard coding anything.

If anyone has some suggestions on how I could proceed with this I would appreciate it.


Thanks in advance!

 

[Argo]

Did you consider running it on a dedicated server within your company? Then you can easily do this in java, c#, vbnet or many others.

Otherwise, you would have to create a stand alone program that users will install on their boxes (in which cases using HTML makes no sense IMO).

As far as spreadsheet goes, do you want it to be xls or csv? If the former, you'll need to use some sort of spreadsheet library (there are plenty for java, and I'm sure that's even easier to do from VB or C#).

Lastly, as far as e-mailing goes - you really can't get away from using SMTP server if you want it to be e-mail automatically. Your company must have some sort of SMTP server - use that.

Anyhow, there's more ways to do this than I can list here. You really can't go wrong with something as simple as this.

 

[ppdes]

The place I work for uses Word documents with fields/buttons/macros inside to do this sort of thing. You open the .doc file in Word, fill out the form including specifying attachments, and click a send button in there. The macro then proceeds to access your Outlook address book and fire off the results via Outlook's email to the appropriate people all automatically, although you have to click through several security warnings.

 

[Markbnj]

If you really have to do it from a stand-alone HTML page you can probably make it work using vbscript and the Excel automation interfaces.