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Excelcels are quite frustrating in many ways. There's often clearly a codecel in there waiting to hatch from their Excel cocoon, but for whatever reason it never happens and these Excelcels get stuck in a cycle of pushing more and more ridiculous use-cases out of Excel.

It's quite impressive, but from a business point of view you get very fragile, impossible to maintain critical processes handled by buttons on spreadsheets. The Excelcels leave and no one can't untangle the spaghetti mess because it's all VBA and spreadsheet functions and none of it is documented.

From the Excelcels point of view as well, they've missed out on proper codecel cowtools and techniques and will always just be an Excel "superuser".

My advice to absolutely anyone who finds themselves at the precipice of VBA realising "Man, Excel can literally do anything!" is to simply give up on it and put your time towards learning something proper.

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Not to mention a shitload of formulas referencing a random fricking spreadsheet you dont even have access to lmao

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I was contracting as a SQL developer at a place who hadn't been able to recruit a replacement for someone who'd left and needed some cover while they recruited, and on day 1 I had about 3 analysts queuing up to go through their automated reports that had stopped working.

I knew a bit of VBA but had learned it relucantly and had been able to refuse to ever get involved, but one of the analysts was hot and quirky so I helped her and omfg the mess.

A "master" spreadsheet with a bunch of buttons to launch other spreadsheets which would refresh a SQL query, do a bunch of pivots and save new files in all different places. Forgetting that there's way easier and free ways to do that already on an enterprise database platform, it was shitty and complicated I could have cried. No error messages, no logging, nothing to help figure it out.

People just shouldn't do it to save future people from having really bad days.

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