I wish I knew VBA!!

[BoredBloke]

Now the client has 14m 45s in which to spend thinking about how to save the company money by shedding more staff.

Well done.

Not really - because

1 - often a mistake was spotted after the update had been done and had to be rectified meaning another 15 min delay. Even opening the sheet with the calculation on would cause a 15 min wait while Excel checked that the values hadn't changed
2 - often they would forget to switch the calculation on again which ment subsequent spreadsheets were saved with the calculation off.
3 - my solution was simple and easily auditable. The developer solution was not. There was no visability as to where the data had come from.

But then I'm not a proper developer!

[xchaotic]

Not really - because

1 - often a mistake was spotted after the update had been done and had to be rectified meaning another 15 min delay. Even opening the sheet with the calculation on would cause a 15 min wait while Excel checked that the values hadn't changed
2 - often they would forget to switch the calculation on again which ment subsequent spreadsheets were saved with the calculation off.
3 - my solution was simple and easily auditable. The developer solution was not. There was no visability as to where the data had come from.

But then I'm not a proper developer!

I'm just guessing wildly here, so please bear with me, but perhaps this is not an ACID transaction anymore and you're working on locally cached copies of values stored in the DB which will yield the same results 99% of the sime, but just sometimes it will just be wrong?

[msubhan]

Ummm...errr..I do a lot of VBA and it is anything BUT complex.
Sure it can get a bit confusing in Excel with looping over ranges, but nothing a good programmer can't figure out.
Easiest way to learn is to record a macro.then look at the code. . Then just go in and modify the bits you need. Heck! I build some of my code that way..saves a lot of time.

Is this not a technical discussion and is sitting in the wrong forum?

It doesn't matter (generally) what language the code is written in...if the developer doesn't have any logic skills then they'll write crap code all day long.

[xoggoth]

Yeh, VBA is generally about as easy as it gets. I tend to do every little utility in Excel/VBA, compare files, bulk file rename, file backup, check the lottery, read old mail archives, alarm system to tell me when The Simpsons is on...

In professional use it's not bad for testing either when the client does not have proper testing software. All the scripts/HTML files I use in small business software are generated from excel. Have demo progs in excel we use at shows that display screen shots from programs.