Had to write some custom VBA Code in excel for a client

OZApps

The few things that kept happening is that my loops would be

for i = 1,5 do

and VBA would complain that I cannot use the , and have to use 'TO' then habituated with Lua to finish a block with an End, it caused VBA to maon and groan even more as End would imply a complete HALT and you had to use the appropriate End as per the situation, End For, End If, End With, End Do, etc

Used to the large screen on the iMac and Textmate, working with the VBA IDE was a pain, it had some cool autocomplete but it was more of a pain than a pleasure (and I spend years working with VB and VBA). Then I tried to start working on a VM running windows and Office, the Mac shortcuts kept interfering with and did not allow using the editor. SO I worked on my Laptop running windows and I realised how small the laptop screens are in comparison to the iMac 27. Now I could get the keyboard going but screenspace was an issue. This was soon managed by the docking on the side feature of Windows to have a side by side view.

Then the thing that was expected but I had not anticipated, when the file was opened in Office for the Mac 2011, it started to spew errors. Some of the most basic functions like the getOpenFilename that displays the fileopen dialog and returns the filename does not work on the mac version. Lots of headaches, so had to drop the mac support for now.

Then since I approach the problem as a developer than a scripter, I found it would have been easier to write a GUI app that processed the data and performed the analysis than trying to run it using Excel and VBA. However never deviate from the clients request howsoever tempting it might be. Ultimately got that through, it now has custom toolbars that the client can use to interact, it even provides some custom functions to locate data from the results for presentation.

This was just a reminder to self that while that is how development was about 10 years ago, now it is different, Lua is more relaxed and the choice of editors make it easier, plus it is forgiving and you can alias functions which if VBA could would have been such a life saver.

ar2rsawseen

So true
+ for more "relaxed" languages
+ for cross-platformability