My company finally changed from MS Excel 2003 to 2007. Part of this late change is compatibility with other programs and of course the natural drive of some engineers to hack their own macros into a worksheet. If such a file proves useful to other engineers, suddenly a tool is born. This gets checked against a number of hand calculated situations and if the outcome pleases everybody the tool is ‘verified’.
Well if everybody has the skills and the will to write proper macro’s there is not so much of a problem. However hitting the record macro button and save whatever comes out is not a good practice in my humble opinion. But that happens a lot. These macros are nothing more than a very restrictive set of actions that can be repeated. A proper macro is more like a clever solid routine that eases everybody’s life a little.
In my role of IT coordinator for the process guys, most of the problems with these tools are directed to me to solve. The largest amount of questions is about “where can I find this or that function on this annoying toolbar?” –This annoying toolbar- is called the ‘ribbon’ by MS, but that is not something I am going to tell them, nobody is interested in these facts anyway.
Yesterday I was faced with a problem of macro hacking kind. Subject of the problem was a tool for calculating pipe line heat loss with the use of a nice loop that was iterating until it came up with the desired values. The results were shown in a tabulated form and in Excel 2003 it was working flawlessly for years.
However there was a page showing the data in a chart, which in itself is not a problem, but MS decided to radically change the way charts work. The underlying macro tried to set the ranges for the axes, but these settings were not accessible anymore. In this case using another template and rewriting the code or simply disabling the buggy code was enough to solve this problem.
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