AutoQuote – Excel Add-In for Microsoft Office Automation

CASE STUDY

Project Start: February 2004
Delivered: April 2004, with development ongoing

Overview

AutoQuote is a modular bibliographic research tool, integrated into Microsoft Excel. The system knows how to extract data from a variety of different databases of bibliographic material, and transform this information into the formats required by the client.

Technical Description

AutoQuote uses C# over COM Interop to handle Office automation. Spring.NET is used to facilitate rapid development and IoC. SOAP and XPath are used to retrieve and process incoming data from various web services in the book industry’s own ONIX format. Testing is performed using NUnit.

Users

AutoQuote is used by the team at Mallory International to do bibliographic research and generate invoices, quotes, proformas and bibliographies.

Benefits

  • Fast – AutoQuote enables users to complete tasks in a fraction of the time it would take them to do the same work manually.
  • Reliable – creates much greater consistency across the organisation.

Technologies

.NET, Microsoft Excel Automation, Microsoft SQL Server, ONIX, Spring Framework, XML, XPath