Ken,

Our current form is similar.
The user just has to enter the qty (and optional price override).

Part of the conversation with the client was something like:
His customer says that he wants to order 12 pairs of black - 2 small, 3 medium, 5 large and 2 x-large. Then he will provide the distribution of the brown, grey, etc.
The sales rep and/or his customer will then want to be able to quickly do subtotals by colour (horizontal) and size (vertical) as in my example below.
I am sure that this could be done in a grid with some clever table design and coding.
A spreadsheet does have some interesting capabilities such as 'center accross selection'. This would allow the heading for 'Gloves - Leather' (or a longer category description) to not require a very wide column.


>Hi Allan,
>
>We faced a similar situation. Out client needed a "quicker" way to enter orders. We gave them a "quick order" dialog with a grid that was prefilled with all of the products and prices. (In our case the list of products and the prices were variable by customer) The grid contained a QTY column so all the users had to do was enter the quantity. In our case, the customers were faxed a copy of their product/price list each week and if they used that list when ordering over the phone, the process was very quick.
>
>Ken
>
>
>>I was brainstorming today with one of our clients who is using one of our order entry applications.
>>The appearance of the current application is probably somewhat typical in that the products are in the grid and each line has the item #, description, price, quantity (entered by user) and extension of the line.
>>He mentioned that several of the endusers would rather see the input screen in a spreadsheet format such as:
>>
>>Gloves - Leather
>>Mens
>>Colour S M L XL Total
>>Black
>>Brown
>>Grey
>>Total
>>
>>The endusers would enter the qty's per colour/size and Excel would calculate the totals both for the colour and the size.
>>Also, each colour/size would be a different item #.
>>
>>From a tecnical viewpoint, I would prefer not to use a hardcoded Excel template but build the speadsheet in VFP 7 and invoke Excel. When they are finished, I would want to bring the data back into VFP 7.
>>
>>Has anyone done something similar and hopefully point me in the right direction?
>>TIA.