EVE Technology Lab

So, my lil project has hit a dead end... so I need to ask for some advice from the people more experienced than me.


Lets start off by saying I'm most experienced with spreadsheets, so I was going to do my setup in google sheets at first, then excel when I realized how slow google gets with a lot of data, I'm not opposed to trying to program it in something, however I am not nearly as experienced and it will take a lot of learning for me, which is not a bad thing I suppose, I do have access to a VPS so making it in a webpage/php/sql is an option but as I said, I am very inexperienced in this so It will take longer and I will probably ask many, many questions :)


Ok now to what I was wanting to make... This will be first and foremost for myself, however I want to let some corp members and possibly other people use it

I was going to make a spreadsheet that either I would download, or in the case of excel I was going to use vba to download the Static files from fuzzworks page... namely invgroups, inv categories, inv meta stuff and the actual item list.

I was wanting to use those lists to have an option in my spreadsheet to select items from either catagory, group, race, or whatever so that I could automatically populate a sheet with predetermined id numbers. I would also of course have a way they could just put in a ranom name as well to add to that list.

I then with that list was going to add columns so I could put an ideal quanity, a selling system, a selling character, a buying system and a buying character

I would then have that spreadsheet via api... or crest if I could figure out how to get a SSO for a spreadsheet program, as well as get JSON to work in excel... anyway I was going to have it track prices in a particular system, and let me know a few things...

1.) when my price was getting beat ( I would do this for buy orders as well as sell orders)
2.) when I sold a certain amount of items and they needed to be restocked. say if I was selling 100 items it would let me know when I only had 25 left for instance
3.) would let me know when I couldnt lower my price to beat the market since I would be losing isk
4.) I was also considering it looking at ... for instance jita prices vs where I was and let me know good items to add to my list of things to sell

5.) I was also going to add a JF part to it so it could take items that were below that threshold that needed to be refilled then let me know when I had enough items needing to be refilled that it would justify me using the fuel... so I dont spend more on fuel than what I would get for profits..

I'm sure I would get more ideas as I went but ya thats the basis of what I wanted... for the most part I woulda been fine except I ran into a wall with the SDE files... I dont want to have to actually open the files to look at the data in them... if everything was in the same spreadsheet I would be fine I could use DBO in the vba and code a simple sql like query and for instance get all itemids that match a group number and are marketable.. but thats the extent of what I could do, I couldnt join that group number for instance with the group name in invgroups


So I guess what I'm asking is... do you guys have any ideas on how to achieve a program liek I want? is a spreadsheet the best place to do it or should I start learning a programming language or php or what?


Thanks in advance for any advice anyone can offer.

tl;dr: I need advice :)

https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/2014/07/26/excel-and-crest/ may be of interest.