Hey Guys, Helping out someone who needs to get a computer neophyte to answer a series of questions that will feed into (ultimately) a budget for an organisation.
The person can not be trusted in Excel to do direct edits etc.
Basically needs to be lead through a series of 200 (approx) questions as to P&L items and how they will vary for the upcoming year (it will be a single person only using this and it will be contained within a virtual machine environment on a dedicated laptop, security will be handled by firewalls etc within the virtual machine)
Each question will be something along the lines of
Q1)
Income account - Sales of widgets - Current YTD = $x, proposed value for next year -
They will be given options in a drop down for the proposed value for next year of %increase, Absolute Value
And will then be able to choose one of the options which would then lead to another input field etc.
Once the questions have all been answered the application would produce a CSV file ready for import back into the budgetting application.
Would you tackle something like this in NR (probably with UIB as the front end) or better done in Excel with a Series of Macros ??
Craig
For a P&L report?
Sounds a bit over engineered?
Yes, Node RED is fully capable, but is all this really needed?
My approach will be some carefully designed XL, with winform inputs - or even an access application, that produces the excel output from user input
Sounds a lot less involved than having to mess with firewalls/VMs for a report? 
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Hi Craig,
By far the easiest approach would be a spreadsheet. Don't forget that you can easily lock down a spreadsheet so that only certain cells can be changed. The structure of the workbook can be completely locked other than specific cells. I've used this professionally many times in the past to collect data from IT numpties. 
You could, of course, also do this in uibuilder. You would probably want to find a form builder library to assist but even doing it manually wouldn't be that hard and you could even use the "form" setting of the uib-element node to build a form for you from JSON data. But, as Marcus has said, it is a fair bit of trouble to set up Node-RED just for this purpose.
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OK thanks Guys
I was going to use this as a bit of a learning exercise and longer term could end up as a package, so whilst the infrastructure for a one off is excessive it would enable it to be easily scaled/duplicated (with appropriate security)
The issue with purely a spreadsheet driven approach is that the person in question will not do the work they are supposed to (i.e. rather than go through and fill in all the necessary info she will write back and ask for XYZ to be changed and updated etc.
By driving her through a process from start to finish we can remove a lot of her being too lazy/inept to get the job done
Will do some more work over the weekend with some AI agents and see which overall approach will be better.
Craig
Don’t forget Microsoft forms and power automate could also work here - providing your O365 licenses has those included.
Yep thats the way i am leaning at this stage as it should come together with less learning needed.
Craig
This might be going off on a tangent, so for those that don't like tangents, stop here.
I once did an experiment to create a "decision flow" flow in Node RED. My idea was that to make a decision tree visible as a flow (a flow being a kind of tree). I tried it out using the NR dashboard v1 (no UIB) and it sort of worked - it did make the decision branching clearer but did also get confusing.
My two experiments are online:
The latter is visually more understandable (being a second iteration) and neither is to be taken too seriously.
As an idea, it's probably a good use case to create decision trees in NR however there needs to be more time and effort spent in creating custom nodes of the UI and branching on decisions.
Whether this is an better approach to something like google forms or MS forms is a matter of taste. I think both products are simple enough for non-developers to use so there really isn't a win in doing it in NR.
