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Comment by sethjohn | Hacker News Reader

Oh @#%!

It's a little embarassing to admit on YC news ;), but pretty much all of the code I've ever written was Visual Basic interfacing with Microsoft Excel!

As a scientist, most data from most instruments gets spit out into Excel files. Being able to interface between Excel and VB allowed for powerful data processing. (My advisor built an entire CO2 climate model in Excel a few years ago!) I'm sure it was all much slower than it would have been written in another language, but it was easy to look at and it did the trick.

What am I supposed to do now? Teach myself Matlab? Not upgrade Excel?

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As a practical matter, if I read the article correctly, VBA is only going away for the Mac. Is that the platform you're working on? If not, no problem. If so:

1.) Not upgrading sounds good .... it's cheap! 2.) You could move to a PC. 3.) You could learn the beauties of CSV format, and the language of your choice. I like Python, but something else might be better for your domain.

The Larger Issue here, IMO, is the peril of using proprietary technologies. It seems unwise to build any long-term project in something a vendor can too easily end-of-life.

I just stumbled upon this: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pythonwin32/chapter/ch12.html

And this: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/440661

Don't you just love Python?

Looks like a fine way to get data out of Excel...but how do I get it back in?!

Should be easy enough if they're using COM objects. But don't ask, ask Google. I haven't run a Microsoft product for a while, sorry (sorta :P)

Yes, I work on a Mac.

The nice thing about VBA was that you could mostly work in Excel, only using VBA to supplement when neccessary. (Open another file to import data, for example. Or take a value from cell X, and plug it into cell Y a couple hundred times until the answers converged.)

You are right about the Larger Issue, perhaps this is a blessing in disguise as an opportunity to wage my own personal war against the Microsoft Monopoly.

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