# On Sunday, I'll have been using Excel for 30 years.  If anyone has been using Excel for longer please reply! Well reply anyway!



## Johnny C (May 20, 2022)

I did a look at how long I’ve been using Excel.  I must be one of the old timers!

I came to this board in about 2006 (it used to tell me) and blimey has MrExcel.Com saved my bacon how many times! And still does to this day!

Windows 3 came out in 1992, May 22nd. I worked at an Investment Management company then, we were given the first PCs (Compaq 386s) on the day Windows 3 came out.
IT chose Compaqs as they were the only ones to survive a drop test. Put it on a desk and push it off onto the floor. Compaqs were the only ones that didn't break. Seriously. Most people probably don't remember Compaq they were bought out by HP. Compaq standard quality was what is considered these days as military quality. 

 I was the only person in the IT dept a) with a degree in IT and b) with PC experience. So I was immediately the PC expert. But look at the dates 2022 May 20th . 2 days off 30 years with Excel. It’s served me well, by next year I won’t be working and Excel will fade away into the distance. As if! I dream about Excel problems. Excel reconciliations are and will always be the stuff of nightmares for me.

But blimey! 30 years! Excel changed the way the world worked. I know Lotus 1-2-3 was the trailblazer. But Excel is what people got when PC's landed.

One thing I have learnt. 99% of people learn the minimum amount of Excel they need to do their job. If you've read this far, you're one of the 1% who figured, keep learning, every day you learn something makes your job easier. My first 'serious' VBA job. Every day we got a CSV file which had to be copied into a spreadsheet, then various sheets updated. You then had t check totals matched. There were a lot of totals. This took an hour. Then the file had to be went out by 9am. So we had to be in at 8am. I got bored and getting in by 8 was a major hassle due to traffic jams at that time. So I got John Walkenbach's VBA book. And figure out how to do it all in VBA. I built a check sheet with 600 cross references and if any didn't match it 'failed' It loaded the source file, amended formulae, and if the check sheet didn't fail it sent it out via Outlook. 

So, I knew it all worked, so one night I set it on a time to start running and as soon as the CSV file landed it started. I rolled in at 9.05am, an hour after everyone else. My manager was apopleptic, where had I been I knew I had to be in at 8 to get the file out. I said to him, check your email, it went out at 8.15. I automated it. He wasn't happy, so I had to leave the Outlook Send out but I could at least get in at 8.55, log on, check the email and send it. The Finance director wasn't happy with the automation, every 3 months I'd get hauled in and told 'you're not checking the file before it goes out' to which i'd reply 'All the checks are built in, there's 600 of them which is more than you could do manually in an hour'. 

I'm in a new job. I got to meet the CFO yesterday. I have a load of stuff to do that it repetetive and not well ordered. So I've automated it. Simple things, change all the source data files for all pivot tables in a workbook, change all the pivot tables in a workbook to use the latest month in the data. Copy the same columns to a file which I might have to do 20-30 times. The CFO said who will be able to fix the macros if they go wrong. I've been doing this long enough to know how to write macros that don't go wrong (I was a trained computer programmer (Pascal, Cobol, Basic, Mumps). Anyway I just said google it. That's how I learn't so much stuff. But it minded me, some companies insist on VBA as a minimum requirement, That just makes so much sense. And yes, I haven't got several jobs because my VBA wasn't up to scratch. 

But anyway, I'm glad I learnt it. There's some stuff I'm proud of, most of all a utility to copy tables and charts from Excel to PowerPoint. Word didn't work you needed bookmarks that most Word users wouldn't know. But PP, that was brilliant, an hour copying pasting 30+ tables and charts and resizing then deleting the old one and moving the new one to the right place - with a macro Boom! Done in 30 secs. I might have had to do that 6 times a day for 3 months. And it never crashed once.


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## Joe4 (May 20, 2022)

I don't remember the exact date, but I started using Excel in 1994, but really didn't start to dabble into VBA until about 6 years later.
Like many others, this site helped me greatly as I dove deeper into VBA.
I did use LOTUS 1-2-3 for a short while before Excel, with an internship I had.


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## Johnny C (May 20, 2022)

It wasn't VBA back then, you had specific macro sheets  I've still got my first macro, pyjama papers. In those days you ordered printouts, they were printed in paper with every other line darkened. It made it easy to read across the page. Cue Excel and laser printers, so I thought I'd write a macro to colour every other line light grey. And so started a life of macros.


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## Rick Rothstein (May 23, 2022)

My involvement with Excel is rather strange. I originally started volunteering answering question about the original version of Visual Basic in online in newgroups (the predecessor to forums for you young'uns out there) about 1999 or so. Microsoft was nice enough to award me MVP status in 2002 for my efforts and renewed the award year after year. When Microsoft brought out the dotNET version of Visual Basic, I HATED IT! People still asked questions about the original version of Visual Basic but the number doing so declined over time, so I figured if I wanted to continue volunteering, I would need to find a new vehicle to so with. Being a graduate math major in college and a practicing Civil Engineer in my work life, I figured Excel with its built-in VBA would be the closest fit (Visual Basic and numerical manipulations, what could be better). So I taught myself the underlying Excel object model and began answering question in both Visual Basic and Excel. After a couple of years of this, I asked Microsoft if I could have my MVP discipline switched from Visual Basic to Excel. They conducted a review and agreed my volunteer efforts in Excel met their MVP criteria and switched my discipline to Excel for which I have had my MVP status re-awarded every year since. Nineteen consecutive years in total between the two disciplines so far. Remember at the beginning when I said my involvement with Excel is rather strange? The reason is in all these years, I have never actually *used* Excel for any actual work (we had programs on our UNIX mini-computer for work related needs). I have only used Excel to answer other people's questions and that is it. I think that may make me the only Microsoft MVP who has no practical experience with the product for whose discipline his MVP status was awarded.


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## Johnny C (May 23, 2022)

That is weird Rick! I guess knowing the object model helps but I can't imagine getting into the weird corners, where Excel/ VBA doesn't behave like you'd expect without a workbook behaving badly. 
I'm fundamentally efficient (or lazy according to my wife) and it just made sense to me to automate the boring repetetive stuff. 
What I find aggravating is that in my world - accountancy - people who are highly intelligent and highly qualified (Masters level) with a professional qualification that takes years, learn the minimum they need to get by with the tool they use most, Excel. Few get past Vlookup. 
I just had a meeting with our new CFO. I've streamlined what I do, so things take a couple of minutes rather than hour. The CFO said, what happens when you leave, if a macro falls over. Well I'm a trained programmer so that's not likely, but they'd just have to either Google it or just do what the VBA did manually. 
Rant over! I just can't believe that, Excel has moved on 30 + years since vlookup, I've kept up but nobody else seems to. There are literally 3 people in the hundreds of people I've worked with who have gone beyond vlookup. 2 who use Index Match.


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## igold (May 23, 2022)

In 1992 I was working for an Institutional Pharmacy as a Purchasing Manager. One day some guy from the IT department came into my office and set up a computer on my desk, and then just left. I can remember that it had Windows and  Excel/Word (perhaps other apps as well). I started fooling around in Excel, but had no clue.


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## RoryA (May 23, 2022)

Johnny C said:


> It wasn't VBA back then


Excel actually got VBA in 1993 with Excel 5.


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## Johnny C (May 23, 2022)

Yeah Rory. I started out on macro 4 sheets. My first macro, pyjama paper - colour every other line grey. Since then. Copy charts/tables to a PowerPoint. Load multiple files, claims, payments, generate bank account claimants/payments, generate intelligent instructions to fix things. Load and error test 2,500 excel files. I've done some 'heavy lifting', some stuff I'm proud of.


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## Dan_W (May 25, 2022)

Thank you so much for starting this thread and sharing your story - I am forever interested in how people first got into VBA and why they continued to use it. As a lawyer, unsurprisingly, there is no expectation that I can use VBA (or that I should even have ever heard of it) - and the natural reaction of lawyers to Excel is to instantly recoil and hiss at it ("Why on Earth would you waste your time with Excel when a Word table will do?"). I first discovered it at work by chance in 2016 when someone came in to demonstrate a script that indexed a folder of PDF files... it was revolutionary, because the method of indexing files that partner had decided to adopt was to get a trainee to sit there over the and copytype the filenames of all 1800 pdf files.... so VBA was the better method....


Johnny C said:


> I was the only person in the IT dept a) with a degree in IT and b) with PC experience.


I'm a bit fixated with this sentence, to be honest. What did the rest of the IT department do/what were their backgrounds? I suppose that there is (and certainly was) more to 'IT' than computers, but still ... I find it fascinating.


RoryA said:


> Excel actually got VBA in 1993 with Excel 5.


@RoryA - Does this mean that VBA is turning 30 next year? I wonder if Microsoft will surprise us all with a major update to VBA and the IDE to mark the special occasion.... 


Rick Rothstein said:


> My involvement with Excel is rather strange. I originally started volunteering answering question about the original version of Visual Basic in online in newgroups (the predecessor to forums for you young'uns out there) about 1999 or so. Microsoft was nice enough to award me MVP status in 2002 for my efforts and renewed the award year after year. When Microsoft brought out the dotNET version of Visual Basic, I HATED IT! People still asked questions about the original version of Visual Basic but the number doing so declined over time, so I figured if I wanted to continue volunteering, I would need to find a new vehicle to so with. Being a graduate math major in college and a practicing Civil Engineer in my work life, I figured Excel with its built-in VBA would be the closest fit (Visual Basic and numerical manipulations, what could be better)


I was read some advice re: self-study of VBA that when you feel like you've run out of resources, pick up one of the VB books. At the time, I thought this meant dotNET, and so figured it would be one of things I'd get to eventually. Then I discovered that they meant VB6, and since then, I'd say that my personal journey is perhaps the reverse of yours, @Rick Rothstein - I've started exploring VB6 and all the source code out there (and there's a lot). I had no idea that VBA and VB6 were so similar/the same language (depending on definition of 'similar' and 'same'), and my current ongoing hobby project is making a VB6->VBA project converter. This is not especially easy when you have a 64bit version of Office (and all the source code is in 32bit), you don't have (nor have you ever had) a copy of VB6 to try the code out on, and a growing realisation that there are many, many things that VBA does not have that is otherwise available in VB6. 

I've been hearing that VBA is a dead language since I started learning it around this time - does anyone with more than my 6 years remember the first time they remember hearing this being said?


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## RoryA (May 26, 2022)

Dan_W said:


> Does this mean that VBA is turning 30 next year? I wonder if Microsoft will surprise us all with a major update to VBA and the IDE to mark the special occasion....


I guess so. And I'm pretty sure, no. In that order.


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## Johnny C (May 26, 2022)

igold said:


> In 1992 I was working for an Institutional Pharmacy as a Purchasing Manager. One day some guy from the IT department came into my office and set up a computer on my desk, and then just left. I can remember that it had Windows and  Excel/Word (perhaps other apps as well). I started fooling around in Excel, but had no clue.


Weirdly enough, this (possibly my last hurrah) is with a German  pharmaceutical suppliers. I was recruited to overhaul the spreadsheets for one division. I overhauled them, but the person who recruited me left. I then got hauled in by the CFO, and asked, you've overhauled the spreadsheets, how do you expect anyone to inherit them. 
I worked in Financial Services mostly. One of the reasons I learned VBA, some companies insisted proficiency and at that time I didn't have it. I know I'm still an amateur, my best is copying Excel to PowerPoint, and pros do code to copy to/from external packages way beyond me. As an accountant though I'm years ahead of VLOOKUP


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## Johnny C (May 26, 2022)

Dan_W said:


> I'm a bit fixated with this sentence, to be honest. What did the rest of the IT department do/what were their backgrounds? I suppose that there is (and certainly was) more to 'IT' than computers, but still ... I find it fascinating.
> 
> [


This was 1989. Computer Science was relatively new. Most people in IT then had progressed from IT Ops. A lot were language graduates, there was a theory that they made the best programmers. Not in my experience. 
I became an accountant which was where due to laziness (as per my wife) I started to learn macros. 
Due to my degree and industrial and PC experience, just fooling around I wrote a PC windows front end for our greenscreen mainframe. I had graphics experience. Unfortunately this upset the technical manager in IT who couldn't understand it so I was 'advised' to look for alternative appointment. Fortunately I'd reviewed some tenders for Finance software because I was the the only person who knew the difference between ISAM and RSAM  (that's how long ago this was). But he offered me a job and I never looked back. Some people in IT refused to speak to me again. 

Love the PDFs solution. I worked for an insurance company. I got caught up in a political fight and was the inadvertent scapegoat. The person who initially fired me though had ****ed up, signed a £100k contract for a new system that turned out not to be able to scan 2,000 excel reconciliation files. It turned out I was the only person who could dig her out of the hole, So she had to backtrack and re-employ me at a higher rate. I wrote a 1,000 line set of macros to do it. When I left I passed it onto a bloke. I met him 6 years later in a shop, and he said it still worked every day all those years later. 

When I got hauled into the CFOs office and asked what would happen in the VBA broke down, I said it won't. I've done this for 30 years. I am a trained programmer. I spent the first year learning how to write code that doesn't break down. 

That's a bold claim I know isn't true. I just did a macro where 
Application. Screen Updating = False
Doesn't work. But Once I get stuff working, it's only new versions of Excel that stuffs things up. 

I also said to the CFO if things go wrong, do what I did, how I learnt VBA, just get them to Google the problem. 

I admit to a huge laziness, if I'm doing VBA these days, I Google and copy and paste and tweak for most things.


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## Johnny C (May 26, 2022)

Lol I edited and it reposted.


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## Johnny C (May 26, 2022)

I tried to edit that post. Here's most of what I changed. 
So when I got hauled into the CFOs office last week and asked what would happen in the VBA broke down, I said it won't. I've done this for 30 years. I am a trained programmer. I spent the first year learning how to write code that doesn't break down.

That's a bold claim I know isn't true. I just did a macro where
Application. Screen Updating = False
doesn't work. But once I get stuff working, it's only new versions of Excel that stuffs things up. The 2003—2007 upgrade stopped some things working. 

I also said to the CFO if things go wrong, do what I did, how I learnt VBA, just get them to Google the problem. Like I said people learn the minimum of Excel. It's like a car mechanic learning how to take wheels off and never learning anything else. I work with well-paid people, I think it's a disgrace they get swat with it. I see people doing stuff like the lady you knew who was supposed to copy the PDFs. Bank account reconciliations are a great example, you can automate 95% of them and turn a days job into half an hour. Literally, I've seen grown men cry when told to do the bank rec because it was a day of hell.


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## Taul (May 26, 2022)

What I’m picking up from this thread, is that laziness is a fantastic motivator.

Same for me, whenever I start something that is going to be repetitive, I start doing things manually until I have understood the nuances of whatever is involved, then I attempt to automate.


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## Joe4 (May 26, 2022)

Taul said:


> What I’m picking up from this thread, is that laziness is a fantastic motivator.
> 
> Same for me, whenever I start something that is going to be repetitive, I start doing things manually until I have understood the nuances of whatever is involved, then I attempt to automate.


Yes, I always say that "necessity may be the mother of invention", but laziness plays a big role too!


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## Dan_W (May 26, 2022)

RoryA said:


> I guess so. And I'm pretty sure, no. In that order.


🥳🎂3️⃣0️⃣


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## Dan_W (May 26, 2022)

Johnny C said:


> It turned out I was the only person who could dig her out of the hole, So she had to backtrack and re-employ me at a higher rate.


That's the dream! Must've loved that.


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## Davmacrat (Jul 3, 2022)

I first started tinkering with a spreadsheet in 1980, called Supercalc.  Did some awesome things with this when in the military, posted to a little station in the Outer Hebridies.  Then in 1985, Microsoft issued Excel for the Mac.  Ugg! Then in late 1987 I found Excel for Windows 3.1. on a PC2386 DX, with a 20mb hard drive. Even bigger Ugg! it was horrible! Every time we created a file that was of any size, it used to corrupt when saved to a floppy disk! Frustration incarnate! But still did some pretty cool things with it even then. Well, it was pretty cool to the guys who had never seen anything like it before.


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## Atroxell (Aug 12, 2022)

For myself, it was necessity.

At first, (gosh, it has to be 1989 or so?) I was working with an engineer who was building test systems for high power light sources (laser pumping flashlamps and short-arc mercury argon lamps) and we did a lot of manual data entry. So we worked on a better solution to get the system to report to Excel. I had minimal impact on that effort, but was intrigued by Excel and continued playing with it, even in my spare time.

I worked for a Lottery vendor (probably yours) for 10 years starting in 1996. I was part of a team that built a Marketing reporting system that became fully automated and did the work of three before the office opened in the morning (thereby making me unnecessary, I guess). The system I built in 97 and 98 ran until 2015, when they replaced it. During the course of development, I expanded my knowledge of VBA to the point where I could generate reports in Excel and have the source database build formulas, execute macros to format and make pretty charts in Excel.

Then I moved into a financial institution where I again automated myself out of a job. But it was because the work (and the work environment was so toxic I willingly did so. 

I moved into a couple of positions since, taking Excel and VBA with me. I have trained dozens of coworkers on everything from simple formulas to automation with VBA. Still enjoy watching something I built work on its own.


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## billfinn (Aug 16, 2022)

I started with 2020 back in the 80's, then switched to Excel when my employer switched.  Dabbled with VBA as I needed it for specific projects.  I would get a flow going, get a project finished and then have to leave it for a while.  As a full time Purchasing person I don't have a ton of time for playing but I always automate everything I can when I land somewhere new.


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## scott14 (Aug 24, 2022)

If the use of Visicalc and Multiplan counts, then I was using those in grad school at UCLA in early 1980s.
Wasn't Multiplan the basis for Excel?


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## repairdroid (Nov 11, 2022)

My first use of Excel was 95, as I was still too young to care about it when it was sitting on the family's Win 3.1 machine. So, almost 30 years.


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## Johnny C (Nov 12, 2022)

Rick Rothstein, sorry I didn't reply. Don't ligon here much these days. 

That was cool, getting MVP without using Excel. 

Some of my 'masterpieces' are driven by requirement. Usually a manager who has no clue about possibilities until you show them them they ask for the world. 

The most complicated I ever did, a claims model for a pension company. People would activate pensions for all sorts of reasons. There were multiple files involved in Excel, CSV, rtf, word format. There were direct debit/credit files from 2/3 working days earlier, thousands of rows, formulae that needed copying down. Then to top it all, it had to intelligently analyse errors and tell someone who may never have used the spreadsheet what to do on what accounts in the general ledger. And a dashboard sheet that changed colours in cells depending on the number of errors. Nuts. But highly satisfying


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