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how can I do this in excel?

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kalos:
"Then you take a program of the "directory reader" type to generate a complete list of all files in a folder."

so I need to run an external program? can't excel do that?

tomos:
he's given you a template file - all you need is to test it with one linked file to see if it works in practice.
-tomos (March 23, 2015, 05:32 PM)
--- End quote ---

^when you've done that^ you can worry about whether you need an app to list files (the "directory reader")

TaoPhoenix:
so TaoPhoenix, sorry but your posts are a bit hard to follow
so do I need anything else apart from the xls index file and the files themselves?
I think you mention something about a program that will perform a dir command to that folder?
but I need to have command line access to the web server, right?
-kalos (March 23, 2015, 05:12 PM)
--- End quote ---

I think this is a valid point.

It doesn't have to be command line access per se - the example I created used a Windows program called Karen Directory Reader.

Those files with the long names are there because they are *in the folder*. So if you don't want them in the index, you'd take them out of that specific folder and put them somewhere else like a "tools folder".

So then when you are happy that only the files you want indexed are there and no more, you will get what you want.

TaoPhoenix:
he's given you a template file - all you need is to test it with one linked file to see if it works in practice.
-tomos (March 23, 2015, 05:32 PM)
--- End quote ---

^when you've done that^ you can worry about whether you need an app to list files (the "directory reader")
-tomos (March 23, 2015, 05:49 PM)
--- End quote ---

Tomos, the process I designed is meant to tie right in to a dir reader because it produces the complete index list of folders all at once - so he will need it pretty quickly. Part of the point is the dir reader "can't lie" vs typing them in by hand. So for example if there are client names, and he enters them by hand, and one of them is something like Schaefeirmann, whoever is doing data entry by hand will get that wrong 3 times out of 10, whereas the dir reader produces a "cold facts" dump where it cannot be wrong with random spelling errors. That's part of the system I designed.

Kalos, my experts here can let me know if there's any internal command in Excel that can do this. But consider for example if my test has three test files in it, then you do it for real and now there's 140 files in the folder, the Excel file and the related export index has no idea they are there. So it has to get the list from somewhere.

Shades:
In the other thread, as Ath already noticed, I mention that many people perceive Excel to be the hammer to "nail" the problem. Although this may initially work, I can tell you now already that this solution won't scale well, if at all. Just open 25 instances of Excel at the same time...I have seen the result of that on a computer with 64 Xeon processors and 64GByte of RAM. A system that has proven to be capable of doing really heavy calculations on huge sets of data with our software, suddenly became so slow that we were called in the middle of the night by the (very upset) board of directors of the company that owned this computer for some serious "grilling".

Since then, there is one mantra. Excel is never, ever a solution. Entering Excel in any automated business process and you won't have to wait until you get burned by that decision. Excel eats so much resources, it is by far the biggest offender in the Office suite...Microsoft should be ashamed of letting such garbage loose on the public. Yet the public yearns for more crap to be bolted on that pile of sh*t.

An approach of generating an Excel file automatically after being triggered or after the interval of your choice is far better and something quite easy to do in already pre-existing solutions such as a CMS.

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