I have a programmer here who is talking about the subject. What is happening now is that the Actuarial department is "pestering" him with requests to extract data from a VSAM cluster (we don't have DB2 on z/OS), format it into a CSV, so that they can download it and import it into Excel. They then massage it in Excel, save it as a CSV, upload it to z/OS, and finally ask the programmer to load the changed data back into the VSAM cluster. I can imagine the shuddering going on, but this is _their_ data and not production data.
Perhaps needless to say, the programmer is getting tired of this. Also, he is very busy with our revitalization of the z/OS system. He is familiar with MS VBA. So what he wants to do is to have a VBA program which can use the Windows MQSeries dll to communicate with a CICS transaction. This transaction would read or write the data on z/OS from the data in the Excel spreadsheet. Personally, I don't _do_ Windows, so I don't know how difficult this would be. But if anyone out there knows of any examples which might help him code up VBA in Excel with MQSeries, I would appreciate a pointer. Actually, what I tried to push was giving the actuaries a way to generate an Easytrieve or COBOL program to do what they want, then submit a job via ftp to do the actual reading or writing of the VSAM data. We can do this in batch because we have SYSB, which allows a batch job to update a VSAM cluster via CICS. -- If you look around the poker table & don't see an obvious sucker, it's you. Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
