I need a little direction so I can ask for the appropriate help.
I have a simple Excel spread sheet that calculates 5 dates based on a starting date and number of hours dedicated to a project. What we are doing is giving people an idea of when a project would be schedule to finish based on the start date and hours worked.
How would I go about having the coded into a website instead of having people download a spread sheet? Is it HTML, Java Script…???
Depends. You can either do it with a server-side language, such as PHP or ASP, or Javascript. It would usually be advisable to make it work server-side, and then add a Javascript solution on top, if desired. That way, your calculation won’t break because someone has disabled Javascript (which would be pretty bad when trying to get new customers). Using a server-side language would also allow clients to save their calculations for later use, generating PDF version and would allow you to fetch the calculations from your server.
Just to add to what Christian has said, the answer really depends on what skills you have - or whether you can get someone with the right skills to do it for you. Personally, I’d go for PHP because I already know it, but it would be quite a chore to have to learn it from scratch just for this one project.
I also agree that a server-side language (like PHP) would be preferable, but then you would have to be sure that the page is hosted somewhere that supports PHP. That shouldn’t be difficult, but it’s one more factor to take into account.
I would approach this with XHTML, PHP (or your favourite server-side language, and MySQL (or your favourite Database).
You could get away with 2 PHP pages: 1 for displaying the results of your calculations, and 1 for inputting your dates and hours. HTML forms would be used to to collect your dates and hours, PHP would submit your dates and hours to the database. PHP would read from the DB and present the data using HTML and CSS.
You may use JS to help display the data or do simple non-critical validation; for critical validation do it on the server-side.