ABAP_to_the_Future

Q. How do you identify an extroverted spreadsheet user?
A. He looks at your shoes when he talks to you.
—Unknown
11 ABAP2XLSX
Many times, when SAP programmers venture out of their ivory towers, go down
to the “coalface,” and meet the people who actually use the software they write
(the so-called users), they are amazed to find that a large number of jobs that people
perform revolve around the following three tasks:
왘 Periodically running some sort of report in SAP and dumping the results into a
spreadsheet
왘 Transforming that data in weird and wonderful ways—often using macros written
by shadow IT Microsoft Excel experts, macros that are so complicated that
they put your ABAP programs to shame and that have big colorful buttons that
make it obvious what the spreadsheet user has to do
왘 Uploading that transformed data back into SAP again
A killer application: Programmers always want to create such a thing, and it’s universally
acknowledged that Excel is just such a beast. Nonetheless, IT departments
have been fighting this tooth and nail for many years; the reasoning goes
that ERP systems were invented to get away from all this. My observation is that
the decade-long battle to stop people using spreadsheets has been well and truly
lost. Given that premise, th e only thing you can do is to make it easier for your
users to do what they’re going to do anyway.
SAP has always been able to talk to Excel, but this chapter covers the open-source
ABAP2XLSX framework that dramatically enhances the data exchange between
ABAP and Excel. The reason I included ABAP2XLSX in a book about new innovations
in ABAP tools is that, in 2012, I gave a presentation to some programmers
and IT managers about all the new things available in SAP ECC 6.0: ABAP Unit,
shared memory, Web Dynpro, and so on. The only thing that seemed to impress
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