New scouting program in development

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by Trevor_Decker

The program look useful, but Why don't you just use Excel; It would be easy to modify year to year, can handle pictures, can be filtered, and does not need a internet connection.

These are wise words.

For this season, I wanted the members of our team doing the pick list scouting to have more tools to make the job easier. In the past, we used a simple spreadsheet with two macros to make cutting & pasting rows easier. I wanted more: coloring, sorting, relating the pick list to the match schedule, aggregating match data, etc. I was toying with writing a DB with a fancy GUI, something that would have taken weeks. Then I realized that everything I wanted to do was possible in Excel with VBA macros. It's not perfect and I could make a better GUI on my own, but the time saved to get an application that is 95% what I want it to be is well worth it.

The lesson here, which is something that I try to drill into our programming students' heads, is to not always try to reinvent the wheel. If someone already wrote something that you can piggy-back off of, use it.

I'm not saying that Excel will work for you, but you should at least consider it. You can focus on the guts of your program instead of the overhead required to start from scratch.