Combination of skills - was [JOB] Perl & VB person, central London

[Hakim Cassimally]

On 20/11/06, Denny <london.pm at metamathics.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-11-20 at 09:42 +0000, Pete Sergeant wrote:
> > Being that most people, in the Real World, are likely to have had a
> > pretty decent exposure to Microsoft Office  [...]
>
> I resolved to keep my exposure to MS Office to an absolute minimum after
> witnessing the amount of times Word locked solid or crashed entirely
> when I was trying to write my final year project reports at university
> (I ended up writing them in joe and then formatting them in Word just
> before I printed them).  I don't think I've used MS Office at all for
> the last four or five years, and very little before that.

Yeah, Word was pretty flakey last time I used it.  But Excel is good,
very good.  Significantly less buggy, easier to use and more powerful
than the OOo attempt, or the lightweight gnumeric.  It has its rough
edges (like doing completely insane things with date entry for
Europeans).

> What's the motivation?  Can you do anything fun and interesting with
> Office?  I'd be mildly surprised to learn that anyone /had/ poked around
> in Office with VB, unless they were being paid to automate something at
> the time.

I learnt Excel/VBA because I had to produce regression testing reports
daily, and they took 2 hours to do the various fiddly steps by hand.
Boredom is a great motivaton factor.

--
osfameron