opening and amending an excel spreadsheet from filePro

[Fairlight]

When asked his whereabouts on Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 02:25:37PM -0700,
Bill Campbell took the fifth, drank it, and then slurred:
> 
> Macros can do all sorts of things.  Back in 1981 when I was
> managing a Radio Shack X-department in D.C. I did my daily
> reports by first putting the numbers in a Visicalc spread sheet,
> the pulling that into a ScripSit document and hitting one
> function key that ran a series of macros that formatted them to
> print on Radio Shack's Daily Report form.  My District Managers
> were amazed to see typed daily reports :-).

In the Lotus 123 days, I was one of -the- macro people in the temp agencies
in my area.

One time I had a stint where we did presentations for a fashion show.  The
books we printed were something like 47 pages of spreadsheets for designs
and such.

One tiny problem.  My boss gave me the wrong formula for a cell.  And
probably a good 20 plus other cells per spreadsheet were based on that
formula's results, etc.  It wasn't a bunch of self-adjusting cells, either.
Some were, but many were hardwired from an assumption the formula made (in
this case, incorrectly).

So we had everything all done, the boss (the Exec VP, no less) calls me up
-from the show-, and tells me the books are all wrong.  He needs new ones
done within 2hrs.  Fixing all of that by hand would have been almost
impossible in a time frame that would leave me time to print and bind the
books.

I spent 15 minutes writing a 20-screen long macro that essentially altered
each sheet, altered itself, propogated it's modified self to the next
sheet, ran on that sheet, etc., all the way to the end of the group
of sheets.  15min to write, 15min to run (which just happened to include
printing in the macro) and bind the books by hand.  I was on my second pot
of coffee by the time he came to pick up the books, which were done well
ahead of his arrival.

Macros save the day again!

One of my fondest memories from temping.  Who writes a 20 screen long
macro?!  Me.  :)  Self-modifying code can be fun.  Dangerous if done
improperly, but beneficial when done correctly.

The boss was happy, though.  :)

Strangely, I loved Lotus 123 macros, but I've avoided Excel macros like the
plague.  If someone needs Excel macros, I usually have my wife help
me--she's the Excel expert here.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis,