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Excel is great, but sometimes it can be abused. I have seen some horrendously complicated VBA sheets that are so much simpler to program in any procedural langu
by GnarfGnarf 4y ago
Excel is great, but sometimes it can be abused. I have seen some horrendously complicated VBA sheets that are so much simpler to program in any procedural language.
If you want to create or read Excel spreadsheets programmatically, I recommend LibXL, a simple and powerful C++ library. https://www.libxl.com/ https://www.libxl.com/
(I am a customer, am not associated with them).
- occamrazor 4y agoCan you expand on that? My view of VBAis that it is a dated, but pretty much standard procedural language.
- GnarfGnarf 4y agoI have seen ungodly contortions to bend Excel to the will of the creator of the spreadsheet, when a few lines of C++ or Python or whatever code would do the trick easily. Intermediate results are stored in columns with no possibility of comments or explanations. You can't get an overview of the logic, as you would by looking at a page of code: it's just cryptic Excel formulae in isolated cells. The constraint of the single-line make formulas opaque and inscrutable. In the end, the whole thing is a mess, impossible to maintain or update. It's not the VBA that is the problem. It's the disparate scattering of business logic. Don't get me wrong: Excel is brilliant for some things. But it has been extended beyond reason by wannabe programmers in the accounting department who discover they chose the wrong career.