For the last days, I’ve been working hard with excel. The more I use it, the more I realize that understand how to utilize excel can bring you to unexpected places. That is to say, Microsoft excel is really powerful tool. OK, probably not the tools, but the concept of spreadsheet itself. You can use it as simple database, treat it like simple programming tools, and even develop viruses by spreading macros. Surely I never realized that, it seems that my fluency in excel is far from perfect, still mediocre indeed.
No believe I am mediocre in excel? Last week my fellows who happened to be the project manager ask me to develop simple macro that act as a bridge to our ERP, that is Ellipse. Yeah, the reason is simple. Jakarta resources are hard to get these days due to resource conflict with global. So instead of asking for them to develop simple business object report and therefore should waiting for resource prioritization, we decided to develop our report accessing directly to and from ellipse itself instead. And that requires macro. Dude, honestly I never develop macro before. I didn’t even know the environment, and even how to print hello world. That is something as a baseline start before you begin the journey with new programming language along the way. So basically, I need to learn VB. Well actually, the language itself is no surprise if I must say. Some similarities are found among languages, and although syntax and even certain things are different, I believe that the concept of programming remains. I must say I rather satisfied with the result. I was managed to develop macro that act as a bridge to ellipse – this is something commonly under Jakarta control –
Today and seems two days ahead, I will busy myself with developing POC. I should gather information from reports already available in order to get certain required result. The thing is, the report I develop should be generic and dynamic depending to data supply. And that means I should be familiar with formulas, even with advances one. At first, I feel terrible since I am not used with excel formulas. But I realize that it was a possibility to learn, so then I like it. OK, probably not really like it since I really made a mistake with some formulas usage, wrong applying criteria because forgetting the trim function, and of course with the reference stuffs. And it took me 3 hours to realize it.
For now on, I guess I should be really familiar with excel. It is indeed a powerful tool. Utilize this and other office tools such as word and power point, really can take you to unexpected places.
I am excel engineer, yet mediocre..
