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Issue: 7.5 (July/August 2009)
Author: Brad Rhine
Author Bio: Brad Rhine is the developer of Kodiak, a complete student information system written entirely in REALbasic. That's his day job. In his spare time, he writes shareware applications in REALbasic.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 11,338
Starting Page Number: 50
Article Number: 7516
Related Link(s): None
Excerpt of article text...
I have a confession to make. Please don't judge me too harshly, but I have a very unhealthy relationship in my life that I just can't seem to get out of. That relationship is with Microsoft Excel. In my job as a school district data manager, I spend a lot of time working with spreadsheets and, even more commonly, tabbed text files. The problem is that tabbed text files with more than two or three columns can be inscrutably difficult to edit by hand, and using Excel... well, that's why my relationship with it is unhealthy. Excel is very powerful but if you bring in a tabbed text file with anything other than numbers or strings, such as ISO dates, numbers with leading zeroes, or anything that Excel might interpret as a formula or function, Excel will quite happily destroy your formatting and sometimes modify your data with nary a warning. This, as the kids would say, is a problem. So I did whatever I do when I have a technology problem. I wrote a REALbasic application!
The Goals
Our tabbed text editor has several goals. First and foremost, is to never change any of our users' data unless the user edits it. Second, we want to make editing tabular data easier by presenting the data in columns. For that, we'll use a ListBox control. In fact, the ListBox will be the focus of this project, since we'll use it not just for displaying our data but also for editing it.
Getting Started
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