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Ah, but once it's automated, how much time do you save explaining (and re-explaining) how to use it to non-techies?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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After the first hour, the time it would have taken to do it the old fashioned way, it becomes a matter of pride!
Monday starts Diarrhea awareness week, runs until Friday!
JaxCoder.com
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I guess we need something like Webassembly Excelassembly.
Then again, having fiddled with the file format I have to admit I'm quite for the Ripley option.
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cheers
Chris Maunder
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And to make things even "better"; the IDE hasn't been updated in more than 20 years (as far as I know).
My plan is to live forever ... so far so good
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Good Tips '489 !
Writing add-ins seems to be the only way to automate Office 365. It is becoming the corporate office platform in a lot of places so indeed MS has done a Ripley on us corporate software developers.
If you do have to work in VBA -there are many toolsets to help write and maintain good code - MZ tools is my preference but Rubberduck · GitHub[^] looks good too.
Its an old but stable IDE -little Intellisense, no autocompletion - but that only helps the coding - not the thinking!
Export all your code modules, forms, spreadsheet content, formulae, formats to text files. Then you can do version control in mercurial, and inspection in Npp
Merging is an issue but you can see what changed and revert or branch.
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Member 12364390 wrote: little Intellisense, no autocompletion
Wish I'd found this sooner:
Ctrl+j
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Have you seen Rubberduck, an addin which uses ANTLR to parse VBA and add more features?
Also, there's a proposal on Rubberduck's repo to create a Language Server Protocol implementation for VBA; this would allow any LSP-supporting editor, such as VS Code, to work with VBA.
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Why not generalize it and write a plugin?
Then you can play DLL-Hell with every machine that needs it.
Of course, if it only modifies and fixes the cells for you, then one machine is all it will take.
Pity me, I once opened the xlsx file and looked at modifying the cells directly.
I backed down, and did it the old fashioned way!
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As a fairly serious Access programmer, I feel your pain! The one complaint that I don't endorse, though, is about the limit on consecutive line continuations, which I must say I have never run into. On the whole, I feel that if you have to continue a logical line over more than a couple of printed lines, you should break up the logic, since it is likely to be difficult to understand if/when you come back to it later, let alone by anyone else!
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With regards to the line continuation issues, what I'm trying to do is create a an array (an ever growing array!) of terms that can be used to categorise an item.
eg
items = Array("item1", _
"item2", _
...
"itemN")
N, for me, has grown beyond the limits of what VBA likes.
What I probably should do is just enter the terms in the spreadsheet somewhere and have the method reference the values in those cells rather than hard coding.
I've well and truly burned through the 1hr I budgeted on this one
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Understandability isn't an issue, then, but I think you are right about what you should do. When I have the same sort of issue in Access VBA, I generally create a new Table (if the 'array' is likely to be needed again) or Recordset (if it isn't), which is pretty much the Access equivalent of entering the terms on the spreadsheet in Excel.
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Understanding the principles of relational database design is a first step.
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Yet another case of someone using excel as a quasi database.
It should have just been done in Access in the first place.
I, too, have done a lot in Access VBA - easy when you know how.
The problem I've found in Excel VBA is that they named most 'things' differently. I haven't done any VBA for Winword, but the same issues probably arise. No doubt that different teams did the initial design for each program.
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Sorry, but it shouldn't have been done in Access in the first place. This is a spreadsheet I'm working on, and it includes text, formatting, multiple worksheets and it needs to be approachable and usable by a non-developer.
The categorisation part is a minor, minor part of this. I'm not a fan of changing the problem to suit the tools. I choose the tools to suit the problem.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Then I apologise for my assumption. I agree with your statement - choose the right tool for the job.
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I think the hardest thing for us is realising that sometimes we shouldn't write an app or dive into the technology 'just because we can'.
What I should have done is looked for an online service that does this and just used that instead. I'd be done 4 days ago.
We had a big meeting this afternoon about this: balance the ease and fun - and fairly hefty price tag - of writing solutions ourselves, vs paying the money and using something pre built that, if you actually do the suns, will be way way WAY cheaper in the long run.
But coding is a drug.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Yeah, I've just written VBA code to validate "date ranges" in Excel, i.e. a range with year, month, and day cells. It also has to identify date ranges based on the year cell containing a validation list.
It's an unholy, un-OOP, mess, and working in that bloody VBA IDE is really a big step down from VS 2019.
"'Do what thou wilt...' is to bid Stars to shine, Vines to bear grapes, Water to seek its level; man is the only being in Nature that has striven to set himself at odds with himself."
—Aleister Crowley
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I'm upgrading my handset, as I mentioned before.
So the first thing I do it connect it to my WiFi ... and shortly after it starts telling me I'm low on PAYG - because it's updating itself and USING MOBILE DATA INSTEAD OF WiFi! 
So that's fixed, and a new PAYG with data, minutes, and text added ... sodding thing.
The fingerprint unlock is good though - really quick!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I have a LG / Android. I can disable data over mobile connection. I only allow data over WiFi. But admittedly, I don't use it much outside the house.
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So do I - but this grabbed 11MB of data before I got a chance to turn it off - which all went at the "expensive rate" since I normally use WiFi data only ...
Glad I spotted it - it just downloaded 3.93GB of Android 10 ... all by WiFi, thankfully!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: So do I - but this grabbed 11MB of data before I got a chance to turn it off - which all went at the "expensive rate" since I normally use WiFi data only ...
AUD$40.00 per month gets me unlimited calls, text and streaming services and 30GB of data, plus with the Missus on the same account her 30GB of data is pooled so we have 60GB to share. Haven't looked at the usage but if we hit 10GB in a month even when I have to tether client laptops off the phone I would be shocked.
OriginalGriff wrote: Glad I spotted it - it just downloaded 3.93GB of Android 10 ... all by WiFi, thankfully!
I've got a Pixel 2XL that I've had for a couple of years now, it's also running Android 10. At a customers the other week and wanted to test/checkthe WiFi. Fired up WiFi Analyser and WiFi Overview 360 Pro and they both require Location to be on to work, reckon this has been required since Android 6.
Do you have anything else that you use or do you have your Location stuff on? I've got nothing to hide but Google can faarrrkkkk off cause they ain't tracking me, at least not as easily as if I had Location on.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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I hated the idea of the fingerprint unlock, but I have to admit that once I started using it (Huawei phone) I found it extremely convenient.
My plan is to live forever ... so far so good
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