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I used to work with someone who refused to learn another programming language besides VBA in Excel. He slowed everyone down and it got to the point where he had

I used to work with someone who refused to learn another programming language besides VBA in Excel. He slowed everyone down and it got to the point where he had implemented a JSON parser and generator in Excel 97. Badly. It's one of the worst experiences of my professional life. I dislike VBA because it convinces those who learn it that it is a programming language and that Excel is a programming environment just like Python or another popular programming language with their standard libraries. That's just not the case, but its very hard to convince business people who have spent their whole professional life using MS Office that there are better choices for building their business apps than MS Office and VBA. Just let Excel and VBA die.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
I worked in a bank where we still used paper because the lead supervisor told us we had to. I'm not talking like paper that was needed so we just kept it in the file, I'm talking "Print out the entire loan profile in paper simply because the supervisor refused to learn how to do use a computer" paper. We're talking thousands of pages a day for ONE LOAN! All because this woman was lapsed by technology and HR had no clue she was so out of touch.
- surfingdino 5y ago
  I know exactly what you mean. MS Office, even on the web, is the equivalent of that kind of mentality.
conductr 5y ago
I’ve been using VBA for a long time. It’s not great but allows for some things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. I like to think I use it as a last resort. That said, I’ve been following the development around using JS and others within excel and I just don’t get it. Or, when I do, it seems ass backwards to me (like a hosted app on onedrive). I don’t want that. And I don’t really see what good using JS is if it’s just a wrapper for the quirky VBA I already am familiar with.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

I worked in a bank where we still used paper because the lead supervisor told us we had to. I'm not talking like paper that was needed so we just kept it in the file, I'm talking "Print out the entire loan profile in paper simply because the supervisor refused to learn how to do use a computer" paper. We're talking thousands of pages a day for ONE LOAN! All because this woman was lapsed by technology and HR had no clue she was so out of touch.

surfingdino 5y ago
I know exactly what you mean. MS Office, even on the web, is the equivalent of that kind of mentality.

conductr 5y ago

I’ve been using VBA for a long time. It’s not great but allows for some things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. I like to think I use it as a last resort. That said, I’ve been following the development around using JS and others within excel and I just don’t get it. Or, when I do, it seems ass backwards to me (like a hosted app on onedrive). I don’t want that. And I don’t really see what good using JS is if it’s just a wrapper for the quirky VBA I already am familiar with.