Crazy stuff indeed. I saw a type of "click-once", auto-update deployment for vba code at an IBank in 2000 that worked wonderfully. Excel models built by trading

Crazy stuff indeed. I saw a type of "click-once", auto-update deployment for vba code at an IBank in 2000 that worked wonderfully. Excel models built by trading desks and investment banking groups themselves are often constructed under a lot of time pressure and one thing about Excel is you can do it wrong and it may still work reasonably well. I have seen some specialty Excel software teams in these environments that refactored those models and made them remarkably robust and coherent. Much of it is just having the time to study alternatives: what part of the model should be on the sheet in formulas, what part in vba, what part in another language via an xll? What questions are the users going to ask and what calculations do they need to be able to see and understand? Where does the flexibility need to be? If a user moves a sheet to another workbook, will the button on it still work? How do you deploy vba code so that if you fix a bug all the models that use that vba code, and all their 'save as' descendants, run the fixed code. There are clever ways to answer these questions but if you condescend to Excel as a development platform, and believe you can't build anything great with it, you may never brainstorm enough to uncover them.