I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your real world ideas and examples. They are the kinds of ideas that can really help smaller shops do the practical, bulletproof kinds of jobs we need to do. I have used your special files technique to replace some old System/36 #GSORT sales analysis programs. I know, it takes us a long time to convert, but some of these programs have not changed in 15 years.

We have S/36 OCL procedures that display a screen to ask for parameters, use #GSORT to create an address-out file using the parameters for

I know from my reading that it is possible to make an Excel spreadsheet read from an iSeries database. I’ve been an RPG programmer for years, and I don’t know where to start. Can you point me in the right direction?

–“D”

I’ll do my best. I have some Visual Basic code that I’ve used for years that I can share with you. I wish I could give credit to the original author, but I don’t remember where I got it.

First, crank up a new Excel spreadsheet. Pull down the Tools menu, select Macro, then Visual Basic Editor. The

i5/OS can be a little quirky when it comes to user profiles. There are little-known facets to System i profile management (some call them loopholes) that allow users to perform system sign-on tricks that are technically not allowed by the operating system. This week, I’ll focus on a few i5 quirks you may not have known about and how they can affect your user sign-ons.

Quirk #1: You can’t create a system i user profile name that starts with a number but you can sign on with a user profile name that begins with a number. In several systems besides