I can only imagine the thousands of lines of code I saved by using Excel '97 for a scientific tabular calculation effort alone.
Because I had already done about the same thing in HP basic before PC's existed, when there wasn't a spreadsheet app anyway.
And it was on my mind the whole time.
It didn't take many more years before clients wanted their results in XLS on one tab and the invoice on another tab. Rather than the DOC files they had been wanting, which were reasonable facsimiles of the top linen typewritten paperwork I used to fax then mail by USPS or Fedex at the beginning. With the original invoice attached using a "gold" paperclip, nothing ever stapled or folded.
Oh how low I have sunk since then :\
Anyway it was pretty easy to switch from Word to Excel using the same fonts and similar formatting, even though direct integration was provided for, I just switched. When clients printed it they looked almost indistinguishable from my old typewritten multi-font documents.
And that just happened to put the paperwork onto the same spreadsheet as the data. Left one blank tab for future AI use, and the two tabs to send to the clients are in place to the right of that.
Eventually there were quite a few tabs in between the blank placeholder and the final two tabs that the clients would receive. Each with its own function to further leverage built-in Excel capabilities and make further progress toward a "paperless" office.
Saved gobs of code there too, but it gets "worse" from here ;)
It all came together by writing more VBA modules until there was an automation "shell" around the working system. Once complete it would stop so you could look at the data, decide what to type into the blank tab ("naturally", in the absence of AI) then hit the button.
Because I had already done about the same thing in HP basic before PC's existed, when there wasn't a spreadsheet app anyway.
And it was on my mind the whole time.
It didn't take many more years before clients wanted their results in XLS on one tab and the invoice on another tab. Rather than the DOC files they had been wanting, which were reasonable facsimiles of the top linen typewritten paperwork I used to fax then mail by USPS or Fedex at the beginning. With the original invoice attached using a "gold" paperclip, nothing ever stapled or folded.
Oh how low I have sunk since then :\
Anyway it was pretty easy to switch from Word to Excel using the same fonts and similar formatting, even though direct integration was provided for, I just switched. When clients printed it they looked almost indistinguishable from my old typewritten multi-font documents.
And that just happened to put the paperwork onto the same spreadsheet as the data. Left one blank tab for future AI use, and the two tabs to send to the clients are in place to the right of that.
Eventually there were quite a few tabs in between the blank placeholder and the final two tabs that the clients would receive. Each with its own function to further leverage built-in Excel capabilities and make further progress toward a "paperless" office.
Saved gobs of code there too, but it gets "worse" from here ;)
It all came together by writing more VBA modules until there was an automation "shell" around the working system. Once complete it would stop so you could look at the data, decide what to type into the blank tab ("naturally", in the absence of AI) then hit the button.
And you were done.