When I was at College, I made mine in Visual Basic, saving the chat unencrypted, in plain text to a dll file in the mapped network drive we all had access to. But I took a print screen of MS Word 97 and used that as the background of my form so when the lecturers walked by - they thought it was just Microsoft Word. It worked surprisingly well. People were less suspicious in the late 90s... they would run anything without a second thought (as evidenced when Newcastle University students sent the Win32CIH virus to someone in the College which was called "Porn2000.exe" and brought every computer in the College to it's knees in an incredibly impressive 3 and a half hours)
Excel abuse hits new heights as dev uses VBA to code spreadsheet messaging app
We shouldn't encourage readers to waste their time like this, but it's the kind blend of wonderful insanity that springs from a sysadmin with time on his hands: an enterprise instant messaging platform that runs in Excel. Of course, nobody would want to deny Microsoft the chance to stub its toe properly by writing its own …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 8th September 2016 05:04 GMT David 132
People were less suspicious in the late 90s.
Some people are still not suspicious even now.
Unable to believe that there was, really, an octopus glyph in the Segoe UI Symbol font (WHY, Microsoft?) I wrote a trivial Winforms app recently that just displayed the glyph, large, in the centre of the screen. Sent "octopus.exe" to my colleagues and they unthinkingly ran it.
And then I had to explain that no, it wasn't supposed to do anything at all. Isn't a large octopus in the centre of your screen reward enough?
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Thursday 8th September 2016 07:29 GMT Novex
Oh mighty, invisible, non-gender specific, big entity in the sky...
...please save me from Excel absurdity such as this. While it's 'fun' to see how far to push a program with in-built coding capability (I've done it myself in Access) it's such torture to try and keep these things going because some PHB (and sometimes not so pointy) decides they actually like it and want to keep using it!
As Mr. Scott once said (in Star Trek V, I believe): "The right tool for the right job". Excel is really pretty much only for data analysis. For everything else, there's 'proper' development tools.
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Thursday 8th September 2016 08:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Excel is really pretty much only for data analysis."
If it can change - then anything is data.
An Excel spreadsheet is a useful way to store lists which can then be sorted and filtered on many different criteria.
I use it to store details of international choirs and their video/events web pages: Facebook, Youtube, Vimeo, and custom sites.
That information is then used by an automaton in VBA/Selenium to analyse any changes to the pages. That takes about 4 fours overnight with a VB.Net watchdog to overcome any unexpected Excel/browser processing hang-ups.
Each choir has a spreadsheet that is the history of changes to the page. Only potentially relevant new items on a page are flagged for human decisions. It also remembers which videos have been found before even if the URL is different. Another spreadsheet remembers if Excel or the browser crashed while previewing a particular video.
Other spreadsheets remember the details of: geographical locations and venues; performance titles; common city name translations in English; month and day of week translations.
The HTML analysis parameters for each page are held in Notebook rather than Excel. They can then be edited easily while VBA is running should a page's HTML format change significantly.
The human interaction is with a layered set of forms and dialog boxes that fill a 27" 16x10 screen plus a 19" 4x3 secondary screen.
The Excel VBA finally produces and manipulates Word documents - the distillation being spewed out as plain text .json files for publishing on a Google Maps javascript page.
Like Topsy - "it just growed". Moving it to Linux Mint will be a challenge.
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Thursday 8th September 2016 20:33 GMT wikkity
useful way to store lists which can then be sorted and filtered on many different criteria.
There's this new fangled thing called a relational database ;-)
> Moving it to Linux Mint will be a challenge.
That is the crux of most peoples issues with excel, It's great for 10 mins of mucking about with data and throwing it away. Beyond that for anything useful it becomes a pit of man hours and only the person who lashed it together and hack every last suggestion in knows how it works. Every new feature means huge changes, often actually rewriting it. I've come across people who have survived redundancies because their spreadsheets have becomes so tangled up in processes.
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Thursday 8th September 2016 09:52 GMT David Roberts
When all you have is a hammer......
......every task looks like a nail.
Nobody can stop the use of any office product for scripting tasks because the person with the problem only knows one scripting language. Real coders are nowhere in sight and would anyway get sniffy about requirements, testing, budgets, ongoing support.
If I had a pound for every middle manager who said "what's the problem? I knocked this up over the weekend and it works fine." I would have spent it all on beer long ago.
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Thursday 8th September 2016 10:29 GMT phuzz
I can't be the only person that uses a spreadsheet (Libre office in my case) to analyse logs can I?
Import as a CSV, and then you can filter and sort to your hearts content, and even graph stuff with a bit of pivot table action.
Yeah, ok, I should probably find a way to feed it into logstash and graphana, but Libreoffice is right there...
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Thursday 8th September 2016 19:12 GMT Holtsmark
I have a spreadsheet that inputs CAN-bus log-files in hex, parses these in binary, and then outputs clear-text information. All using only Excel native commands, no VBA or similar.
A very useful tool.
However; if I had the chance, then I would have the dev-. team at Microsof Office undergo some light waterboarding, followed by a brief (by it's very nature) visit to the scorpion-pit.
Who the hell thought it was a good idea to hard-code the default line with of a charted curve to 1.5?
..yes, it looks better for your example containing Bill and Bob, and the months January to March, but once you have 72 lines overlapping, you can not see anything, and you are forced to re format every single line one at a time!
And, after all these years, why is there no xyz diagram option? It must be very EASY to code, and it would be a good reason to actually upgrade.
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Friday 9th September 2016 07:30 GMT JimRoyal
No. I did it as well. Looking for contract jobs, downloading data from Jobserve, import into Excel and had a VBA filter which took out jobs I did not have the skills for, towns too hard to get to on a daily basis etc. It used to trim the list down from 750ish to about 50 in a minute or two.
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Tuesday 13th September 2016 00:09 GMT Trixr
I use Logparser - one of those awesome MS apps like Robocopy. Shame they can't extend that kind of quality to their OSes or Office.
Logparser will process a structured text file (doesn't have to be CSV - it's easy enough to create parsing rules) using SQL-type queries, and is lightning fast. Outputs to CSV, text, on-screen sortable grid and even graphs.
If you've got big log files (or even not so big ones) or lots in a series, that's the tool to use.
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Thursday 8th September 2016 11:46 GMT agurney
Back in the 1980s I used Mentor Graphics' document scripting language on an Apollo workstation to calculate tidal gates and generate tide tables.
[When I lost access to the Apollo I ended up converting the script to GW-basic .. it now gets fired up once a year in a Windows 98 virtual machine. It still works, so I don't see a need to bring it into the 21st century]
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Thursday 8th September 2016 13:29 GMT Jonathan 27
This sounds like another example of "wrong tool for the task". If they have Office, wouldn't it make sense to do this in Access, all the controls are in there already. You could have your "messaging app" written in about an hour and messages wouldn't take 40 seconds. Also, you won't hit the issue Excel does as your workbook expands. The solution in the article won't scale very well and will eventually corrupt the "server" worksheet.