
VBA for Macintosh goes away - bootload
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/04/25.html
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sethjohn
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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mxh
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.

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omouse
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?

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

~~~
omouse
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)

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Goladus
That article reads like a semi-subtle "Told you so!" re: the famous API War
article.

