Use Excel to create smart forms and calculator scripts

Every day, people make a lot of calculations, some of them quite complicated:

• How much paint do I need for the bedroom?
• How many seed packets do I need for my garden space?
• How many yards of fabric do I need to make new curtains for my bedroom?
• I really have to write that expense report, but how do I handle the receipts in Swiss francs?
• I wonder if I can use two graphics cards with this desktop computer model – does it have the required space, power and cooling?
• Our teleconferencing system costs $0.17 per participant and minute – what will be my cost for a 30-minute meeting with 11 participants?

When you create a website, you want to help your visitor with as many of these calculations as possible. This makes it easy for your customer to arrive at the right decisions, quickly.

Designing an intelligent and attractive website

Using smart forms and calculators on your web gives you a number of major advantages:

• Visitors stay much longer on your website. The smart tools you provide make your website much more interesting and valuable, which increases the chance of visitors adding a bookmark for it or forwarding a link to it to a handful of colleagues.
• Active customers move faster towards a purchasing decision. Your tools and calculators invite the customer to analyze their requirements and start filling their shopping baskets. With all that work done, why do the purchase somewhere else when they can just press the Checkout button to get what they need?
• Customers know a lot more before they call. Using the smart tools on you web, potential customers can analyze their requirements, calculate prices and compare solutions without your help. When customers call, they already know what they need.
• It gets easier to understand your product. Some products are difficult to explain without a simple example. But why make that example static, and abstract? Allow the visitors to fill in their own values, and to see the results immediately.
• There is less risk for mistakes. When your visitors fill in forms on your website, they get immediate feedback if values are inconsistent or outside the common ranges.
• You separate yourself from your competitors. By continuously extending the range of free tools on your website, you make it more attractive to visit your site than any of your competitor’s.

Using Excel for website calculators

A clever program called SpreadsheetConverter automatically converts a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet into a web page that looks and functions just like the original spreadsheet. It has the same rows and columns, uses the same formulas and arrives at exactly the same results.

Now you can use your favorite spreadsheet directly on your website without effort – intelligent price calculators and proposal tools, smart order forms, product configurators, financial analysis tools and much more.

Using Excel for your website calculators gives you a number of benefits:

• You make your calculations available to any visitor of your website. There is no need to download and install a spreadsheet file; the calculations can be done directly on the web page. When you convert Excel to HTML you never need to worry about technical compatibility.
• You don’t need a developer. Having a web page perform advanced calculations is fairly complicated. If you want this programmed by hand, you need an experienced Javascript developer to do the coding, testing, documentation and maintenance of each little calculator on your website. SpreadsheetConverter generates 100% error-free code, every time. Just make the Excel spreadsheet work the way you want it to work before you convert it.
• You can re-use the calculators you already have. Often, the little tool you need on your website already exists in your organization – in the form of a spreadsheet. Run it through SpreadsheetConverter and make it available to the world.
• You don’t have to fight with HTML. SpreadsheetConverter automatically reads all the formatting in the spreadsheet: fonts, font sizes, font colors, background colors, borders, border types, images etc, and converts it all to flawless HTML. The web page looks just like the Excel spreadsheet.
• It’s one of the easiest ways to create dynamic charts for the web. The data that the user enters on the web page can be used to directly generate or update a dynamic chart, just like in Excel.
• It’s one of the easiest ways to handle forms on the web. If you use SpreadsheetConverter to generate smart forms on the web, you can receive each submitted form directly via e-mail. You can also have each completed form automatically saved in a hosted database, from which you can obtain all pending form submissions (e.g. daily or weekly) in one convenient Excel file.

Technical information

• The generated web pages work in all standard web browsers. Depending on your operating environment, SpreadsheetConverter converts Excel to web format by including JavaScript instructions, Java/JSP code or ASP/ASP.NET applications.
• Your visitors don’t need Excel to run your calculators. Once your spreadsheet has been converted, you don’t need Excel anymore. The web browser contains all the functionality required to run your calculations directly on your web page. You don’t need to install Excel on your web server. Your website works great, whether your visitors have Excel or not.
• You pay only once for SpreadsheetConverter. You need one license for each developer that converts spreadsheets to web format, so most customers only need a single license. There are no per-server or end-user licensing fees, and you may distribute the converted programming code freely without royalties.
• You work with professionals. The people behind SpreadsheetConverter know all about spam protection, data integrity and user privacy. At each step in the process you can be sure that SpreadsheetConverter uses industry-standard tools, procedures and guidelines to protect you and your visitors from intruders and offenders.