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This was a "proof of concept" project to identify the benefit of utilizing existing business rules of legacy systems for newer architecture. In this case the company was a Visual Basic shop so I purchased a book (Access 2002 Bible) and created an Excel spreadsheet wrapper using VBA (something they could identify with).

I know nothing of "feedlot peformance" business rules but found a spreadsheet online that did. I created an Access application that would permit them to utilize the "proven and tested" business rules of the spreadsheet application within a newly architected Access form which was truly a user interface; the form fields had a spreadsheet coordinate (reference status bar in demo) and the baseclasses did the rest to include identifying readonly fields.

Experience has shown me that it is best to first architect the older system, fully understand the vision statement and new requirements, perform a risk analysis and then comply with a gap analysis. The deliverables of the envisioning and planning phases would meet the "core requirements" (utilizing as much of the older architecture as possible via COM and web services) with recommended versioned releases to phase out legacy code. The results are a more timely deployment and reliable product.

Disclaimer: not all fields were fully implemented - it was more a proof of concept then a fully functional application; the fields affected did result in the spreadsheet calculations being performed as if they had been manually updated.