revisiting Excel spreadsheet

My brother called me up about Excel last Friday. He wanted some automation with his spreadsheet. He said he's been doing it manually and trying to update the values as best as he could.

I don' t know much about coding in Excel but it turned out to be interesting learning about old useful stuff that I never really used when using this software.

Excel turned out to be an "excellent" distraction in my mundane and pressured tasks with both my two jobs and at home.

It all started out as an editing and formatting spreadsheet. Then became a mini VB project for data manipulation.

One of the things I learned about is creating those wonderful lists... I was about to create hundreds/thousands of combo box but turns out that Excel already provides those wonderful lists via Data Validation. Thru data validation, I created lists in my hidden sheets and defined them via data validation.

Things I learned while doing this mini project:

1. Creating those wonderful lists via data validation
2. Re-learning about protecting spreadsheet and how it sucks in Excel
3. Almost panicked when I can't un-protect my workbook!
4. Microsoft Excel VB Reference - I have a new respect for Excel and VB, it rocks!!!
5. Objects for sheets, cells, and ranges - all those good things that were just under my nose and I'm just learning about it now
6. How about that print area... fantastic.
7. Date/time type conversion to double and vice-versa

It was a wonderful experience, I have tried to learn about it and at the same time provide some good IT service to my brother and spend some quality arguments with Steve, hee... it was fun.

-æ-