The TPA Spreadsheet
TPA provides an Excel 4.0-compatible spreadsheet capability to allow you to store numerical, formatted or table-oriented data in your commodity database .
There are two parts to TPA's spreadsheet support, the template and the database contents. The idea is to put as little as possible of the spreadsheet information in the commodity database, since duplicate information that doesn't change from day to day will then take up space in each days storage. Instead, TPA only stores in the actual database the numbers that you want to enter; the formatting, formulae, etc. live in a template file, which is a standard Excel 4.0 .XLS file. In this way, each time you add a new day to the database , its spreadsheet comes up with the template formatting and contents.
You are free to change the template , or even choose a new one , so that TPA conforms best to the way your organization does things. The example that ships with TPA illustrates this concept: there formulae in the template which carry out calculations on just a few cells. These cells are left empty in the template. However, when they are filled in in the database editor, the formulae pick up the correct values. Only the few cells that are different from day to day are stored in the commodity database. In order to prevent things from getting out of hand, TPA will not allow you to alter or overwrite in the editor any cell that was edited in the template .
How it works:
When a new day is selected in the database editor , or a spreadsheet quantities or spreadsheet relationships question is asked, or a spreadsheet related function is called from within the TPABasic™ programming language, the following happens:
a) The spreadsheet is filled in from the current template file.
b) The current day's spreadsheet data from the database is inserted into the appropriate cells
c) The spreadsheet is recalculated, giving the formulae the correct values
Choose one of the following for information on carrying out specific tasks:
Editing the TPA Spreadsheet template
Editing the TPA Spreadsheet data
Spreadsheet internal functions/run-time library