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I am being tasked with creating a form (I work as an Engineer), a bit like an Excel spreadsheet where the output will be a list of "Part numbers". I would like to be able to create a form, that has inputs that are logical. For example, it turns off certain inputs if another input is selected. I.E "Do you want a sandwich: Yes|No". If "No" is selected, it'll turn off the next question "What do you want on your sandwich?". I find that Excel isn't very good at this, and in particular, it's not very good at changing pictures. Which would also be very handy, if a picture is changeable based on rules.

As an example of what I'm after. There is software called "Driveworks" which is an addon to "Solidworks". This allows the user to create forms, and drive inputs by "Variables" which are parameters with their own rules built in (based on IF Statements etc.). It also creates word files, excel files based on the above too.

This will be a sort of "Configurator", but I don't want it to communicate with Solidworks/Inventor in any way. Just a form (for now).

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    Should the form be a web page? Or a sequence of several web pages? Or an Android app? Or desktop Windows app?
    – Nicolas Raoul ♦
    Aug 21 '17 at 11:39
  • Either a webpage/series of webpages or a windows app would be good. Basically the idea is, our Sales guys can use it to configure what they want.
    – Nareik
    Aug 21 '17 at 14:13
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    What should be the output? Word and Excel files?
    – Nicolas Raoul ♦
    Aug 22 '17 at 7:18
  • Yes Word and/or Excel would be good :)
    – Nareik
    Aug 22 '17 at 9:47
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    have you tried google forms? As far as I know, forms themselves are quite customisable (including possibility to ask questions depending on previous answers) and there is some form of export to google spreadsheets.
    – Alissa
    Aug 23 '17 at 13:46
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This process is more manual but is more configureable.

You could setup a web server such as apache and connect it to a mysql server via php,perl, or another supported language.

Using php you can make your web site look like anything you want.

You can export from mysql to csv or similar which can be loaded in excel. There are probably prebuilt php libraries to interact with word documents.

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  • If the OP can program, then Python has some excellent libraries for generating Word & Excel documents. Since a Widows app is acceptable, Lazarus is free and great at conditionally showing and hiding form components. However, since there are many possible solutions, I would choose the one that works best with Word & Excel, and that is Python.
    – Mawg says reinstate Monica
    Oct 19 '18 at 9:57
  • Note that your PHP can't generate static HTML, you will either need to use AJAX or generate HTMl with some gnarly JavaScript to manipulate the DOM to show/hide/create/destroy form components. And neither PHP nor JS are particularly good at generating Word or Excel documents. CSV is no problem, but that requires an additional manual step by the OP and only works for Excel, not Word.
    – Mawg says reinstate Monica
    Oct 19 '18 at 9:57

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