5 things I taught myself to do within MS Excel’s macro modules:
- automatically find and “commit” existing data (by saving values and removing all formulas) in non-empty cells
- referencing + manipulating cell contents for VB programming
- automatically add to, remove from, and sort lists within ranges of cells
- create (and abuse) snarky user interaction windows/prompts
- establish a data connection with an online table + refresh the table
These things are pretty basic for advanced Excel developers, but for me, one who is in between the unwashed masses and the mildly initiated, well, I feel pretty damn good about figuring this stuff out mostly on my own (Google, Macro Recording, a coworker, and Herman were great helps along the way).
It has been said that necessity is the mother of all invention, but I think my inventions are bastardized in nature, as laziness is fact the real mother of these inventions! Like one of those secret plots, where the king’s child is actually born of a concubine (in this case, a very seductive and clever, albeit lazy concubine), but the public is kept from this knowledge, to protect the good name of the royal family. But even more secretly, the queen is fuming, but also satisfied because the child takes care of her needs… too? I am not sure this translates.
In any case, I was being a sneaky cleverist, and made a whole bunch of macros/functions/buttons for deciding how an expense tracking workbook would work. This was for the project managers here at Open Text, IT. I believe myself and any that follow would not enjoy the laborious task of manually maintaining the sheet’s infrastructure and editing the VB code to accommodate for the slightest changes, so I wrote it in a very hands-free fashion, and it will work flawlessly so long as no one decides to delete random columns/rows… Which no one ever does, right? RIGHT?! Well, i can leave documentation, and that’s about it really… Here’s to hoping no random user decides to “clean” my sheets.