This is how and, more importantly, why I learned to program. My office uses a horribly unintuitive centralized database from which employees 'pull reports' to p

This is how and, more importantly, why I learned to program. My office uses a horribly unintuitive centralized database from which employees 'pull reports' to prove to supervisors the work they've done. One of the guys in the office was maintaining a monthly report that involved him burning 3 hours a week pulling and compiling reports into a needlessly complex Excel spreadsheet. I offered to help out, and wrote an Excel macro that did the job for him. From there, I figured 'hell, why should everyone have to spend time doing this?' So I downloaded a copy of VB and learned enough of it to turn the Excel macro into a simple deployable application that turned an absolute waste of manpower into an easy-to-use desktop app. In hindsight, a native application wasn't the best way to do it. Our office has a strictly controlled internet/intranet policy, and the people maintaining the database are likely too busy doing just that — maintenance — to build a more robust data reporting system. That might be the beauty of learning on your own, you quickly gain insight into how things should and could work. It wasn't his point, but simonw is right: building things IS fun. I got started and I haven't looked back.