On Sunday, I'll have been using Excel for 30 years. If anyone has been using Excel for longer please reply! Well reply anyway!

igold said:

In 1992 I was working for an Institutional Pharmacy as a Purchasing Manager. One day some guy from the IT department came into my office and set up a computer on my desk, and then just left. I can remember that it had Windows and Excel/Word (perhaps other apps as well). I started fooling around in Excel, but had no clue.

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Weirdly enough, this (possibly my last hurrah) is with a German pharmaceutical suppliers. I was recruited to overhaul the spreadsheets for one division. I overhauled them, but the person who recruited me left. I then got hauled in by the CFO, and asked, you've overhauled the spreadsheets, how do you expect anyone to inherit them.
I worked in Financial Services mostly. One of the reasons I learned VBA, some companies insisted proficiency and at that time I didn't have it. I know I'm still an amateur, my best is copying Excel to PowerPoint, and pros do code to copy to/from external packages way beyond me. As an accountant though I'm years ahead of VLOOKUP

Dan_W said:

I'm a bit fixated with this sentence, to be honest. What did the rest of the IT department do/what were their backgrounds? I suppose that there is (and certainly was) more to 'IT' than computers, but still ... I find it fascinating.

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This was 1989. Computer Science was relatively new. Most people in IT then had progressed from IT Ops. A lot were language graduates, there was a theory that they made the best programmers. Not in my experience.
I became an accountant which was where due to laziness (as per my wife) I started to learn macros.
Due to my degree and industrial and PC experience, just fooling around I wrote a PC windows front end for our greenscreen mainframe. I had graphics experience. Unfortunately this upset the technical manager in IT who couldn't understand it so I was 'advised' to look for alternative appointment. Fortunately I'd reviewed some tenders for Finance software because I was the the only person who knew the difference between ISAM and RSAM (that's how long ago this was). But he offered me a job and I never looked back. Some people in IT refused to speak to me again.

Love the PDFs solution. I worked for an insurance company. I got caught up in a political fight and was the inadvertent scapegoat. The person who initially fired me though had ****ed up, signed a £100k contract for a new system that turned out not to be able to scan 2,000 excel reconciliation files. It turned out I was the only person who could dig her out of the hole, So she had to backtrack and re-employ me at a higher rate. I wrote a 1,000 line set of macros to do it. When I left I passed it onto a bloke. I met him 6 years later in a shop, and he said it still worked every day all those years later.

When I got hauled into the CFOs office and asked what would happen in the VBA broke down, I said it won't. I've done this for 30 years. I am a trained programmer. I spent the first year learning how to write code that doesn't break down.

That's a bold claim I know isn't true. I just did a macro where
Application. Screen Updating = False
Doesn't work. But Once I get stuff working, it's only new versions of Excel that stuffs things up.

I also said to the CFO if things go wrong, do what I did, how I learnt VBA, just get them to Google the problem.

I admit to a huge laziness, if I'm doing VBA these days, I Google and copy and paste and tweak for most things.

Lol I edited and it reposted.

I tried to edit that post. Here's most of what I changed.
So when I got hauled into the CFOs office last week and asked what would happen in the VBA broke down, I said it won't. I've done this for 30 years. I am a trained programmer. I spent the first year learning how to write code that doesn't break down.

That's a bold claim I know isn't true. I just did a macro where
Application. Screen Updating = False
doesn't work. But once I get stuff working, it's only new versions of Excel that stuffs things up. The 2003—2007 upgrade stopped some things working.

I also said to the CFO if things go wrong, do what I did, how I learnt VBA, just get them to Google the problem. Like I said people learn the minimum of Excel. It's like a car mechanic learning how to take wheels off and never learning anything else. I work with well-paid people, I think it's a disgrace they get swat with it. I see people doing stuff like the lady you knew who was supposed to copy the PDFs. Bank account reconciliations are a great example, you can automate 95% of them and turn a days job into half an hour. Literally, I've seen grown men cry when told to do the bank rec because it was a day of hell.

What I’m picking up from this thread, is that laziness is a fantastic motivator.

Same for me, whenever I start something that is going to be repetitive, I start doing things manually until I have understood the nuances of whatever is involved, then I attempt to automate.

Taul said:

What I’m picking up from this thread, is that laziness is a fantastic motivator.

Same for me, whenever I start something that is going to be repetitive, I start doing things manually until I have understood the nuances of whatever is involved, then I attempt to automate.

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Yes, I always say that "necessity may be the mother of invention", but laziness plays a big role too!

Johnny C said:

It turned out I was the only person who could dig her out of the hole, So she had to backtrack and re-employ me at a higher rate.

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That's the dream! Must've loved that.

I first started tinkering with a spreadsheet in 1980, called Supercalc. Did some awesome things with this when in the military, posted to a little station in the Outer Hebridies. Then in 1985, Microsoft issued Excel for the Mac. Ugg! Then in late 1987 I found Excel for Windows 3.1. on a PC2386 DX, with a 20mb hard drive. Even bigger Ugg! it was horrible! Every time we created a file that was of any size, it used to corrupt when saved to a floppy disk! Frustration incarnate! But still did some pretty cool things with it even then. Well, it was pretty cool to the guys who had never seen anything like it before.

For myself, it was necessity.

At first, (gosh, it has to be 1989 or so?) I was working with an engineer who was building test systems for high power light sources (laser pumping flashlamps and short-arc mercury argon lamps) and we did a lot of manual data entry. So we worked on a better solution to get the system to report to Excel. I had minimal impact on that effort, but was intrigued by Excel and continued playing with it, even in my spare time.

I worked for a Lottery vendor (probably yours) for 10 years starting in 1996. I was part of a team that built a Marketing reporting system that became fully automated and did the work of three before the office opened in the morning (thereby making me unnecessary, I guess). The system I built in 97 and 98 ran until 2015, when they replaced it. During the course of development, I expanded my knowledge of VBA to the point where I could generate reports in Excel and have the source database build formulas, execute macros to format and make pretty charts in Excel.

Then I moved into a financial institution where I again automated myself out of a job. But it was because the work (and the work environment was so toxic I willingly did so.

I moved into a couple of positions since, taking Excel and VBA with me. I have trained dozens of coworkers on everything from simple formulas to automation with VBA. Still enjoy watching something I built work on its own.