WYSIWYG Programing

[CrouchingWayne]

Hi all

I recall many years ago Visual Basic offered a way to work with a WYSIWYG interface to create applications. Obviously there was scripting involved but this was done from within the VB interface if I recall correctly.

I recently stumbled upon Unity which offers a similar experience but targeted at gaming.

Is there something around these days which brings that user friendly interface approach to creating more business oriented programs? I'd like to puddle with importing data from excel, manipulating it and creating some outputs which I don't think Unity can help with.

Thanks

[Thorburn]

Any of the Visual Studio languages are relatively simple to build a basic WinForms or Universal Windows Platform application in, and Visual Studio Community is free: https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/

Out of the box it supports Visual C, C++, C# and VB.net I believe.

Alternatively you have fully visual application/game creation tools like Multimedia Fusion 2 which I use to rapid prototype some things: http://www.clickteam.com/multimedia-fusion-2

Not sure it will handle Excel files, but can do CSV imports.

[loudlashadjuster]

It might depend on what you're pushing the data into, but if you're working with Excel then it's worth remembering that Office already has a scripting language and IDE with wysiwyg form builder baked in.

Just press Alt+F11 and you're there.

It's basically VB6, so might be a bit familiar to you, and while it might be deeply unfashionable and it certainly doesn't have the flexibility or scope of a modern language/IDE, particularly if you're pushing data to the web, for tactical wrangling of data in or out of Excel it can make sense to keep things native.

The learning curve is pretty easy too, plenty of help on the web (helps that the language/object model has been effectively static for a decade), and it doesn't require you to set up and manage a dev environment.

[CrouchingWayne]

Great thanks for the links - my programming knowledge isn't the greatest but I am familiar with Javascript and some basic C# as well as online scripts such as PHP/MySQL - from my experience so far C# seems a bit easier to use. Happy to pick up any others required though.

The program I have in mind is to help with work - basically I want to load a trial balance (4 columns - identifier code, opening balance, period movement, closing balance) and then with other screens that data can be cut up to be analysed.

I'm hopeful the programming associated with this is fairly basic and the hard bit is the knowledge on how to cut it all up... Which I hopefully have already..!

If you have a steer on what would suit best I'm all ears. Although having typed it out I am wondering if I would be best to consider a cloud/web based system.