Complicated excel sheet

[James Patrick]

Hello,

 

If anyone can give me any advice on this it would be greatly appreciated. We have a quite large excel spreadsheet for working out job prices and I was wondering if I should replicate this in filemaker. I can easily reproduce the spreadsheet and calculations but we have multiple lines which I thought I could do using repeating fields.

 

Is this a good idea or will it slow the database down?

 

I thought about using portals but there could be 20 lines of calculations per job and I thought it might get a bit complicated.

 

It would be great to hear anyones thoughts.

 

Thanks

 

James

 

[comment]

What exactly does "multiple lines of calculation" mean? Perhaps an example would be helpful.

[James Patrick]

Hi Comment sorry to be so vague.

 

When I say multiple lines I mean one line of calculations repeated. Each job can be broken down into about 20 lines of calculations. To put it simply a job gets broken down into elements and each element has an amount of labour hrs that need multiplying by the hourly rate.

 

Thanks

 

James

[comment]

It sounds very similar to an invoice with about 20 line items. Why would a portal be "a bit complicated"?

[James Patrick]

Hi Comment, I thought that using repeating fields would be simpler than using a portal.

 

You are correct that it is similar to an invoice. Is there an occasion where using repeating fields would be preferable than using repeating fields?

[comment]

Is there an occasion where using repeating fields would be preferable than using repeating fields?

 

You mean preferable to portals. Almost never. Portals are more flexible (you create only the elements that apply to a job) and allow you to produce reports on your data.

[James Patrick]

I think I will use portals instead, thanks Comment.