Using Excel as a GUI for data entry

General Usage
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1

Can anyone tell me if the following is a ridiculous idea or not.

For interactive manual data entry, Excel (or one of its free spreadsheet equivalents) seems like a very versatile kind of “GUI”.

The following toy code works OK in a normal REPL outside of VS Code (due to the persistent readline() problem).

Is there a better way to pause the Julia flow than using readline() and waiting for the external program to finish?

Toy example using XLSX.jl 
using XLSX

dir = pwd()
tempfile = joinpath(dir, "tmpsheet.xlsx")

XLSX.openxlsx(tempfile, mode="rw") do xf
    sheet = xf[1]
    sheet["A1"] = "X";  sheet["B1"] = 0.0;
    sheet["A2"] = "Y";  sheet["B2"] = 0.0;
end

while true
    run(`cmd /c start "" /b $(tempfile)`; wait=false)
    println("\nEXIT loop [Y]/N?")
    str = readline()
    str ∈ ("", "y", "Y") && break
end
X, Y = XLSX.readdata(tempfile, "Sheet1!B1:B6");
println("X = $X, Y = $Y")
2

I think it makes a lot of sense in an industrial setting where everyone has Excel. We used to do this at my former company, where a spreadsheet was used to enter setup data for plotting to PDFs a series of many antenna patterns. For us, the Excel file was prepared beforehand and its file name was passed as the single input to the main program.

3

Thanks Peter. The use case I have in mind is to use this in a menu-driven type of program - see simple example here, where the benefits are nicely highlighted.

4

May be not exactly that, but related: GivEmXL.jl

5

I use Term.jl and NativeFileDialog.jl for my menu-driven program.

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