On Sunday, I'll have been using Excel for 30 years. If anyone has been using Excel for longer please reply! Well reply anyway!

[Johnny C]

I did a look at how long I’ve been using Excel. I must be one of the old timers!

I came to this board in about 2006 (it used to tell me) and blimey has MrExcel.Com saved my bacon how many times! And still does to this day!

Windows 3 came out in 1992, May 22nd. I worked at an Investment Management company then, we were given the first PCs (Compaq 386s) on the day Windows 3 came out.
IT chose Compaqs as they were the only ones to survive a drop test. Put it on a desk and push it off onto the floor. Compaqs were the only ones that didn't break. Seriously. Most people probably don't remember Compaq they were bought out by HP. Compaq standard quality was what is considered these days as military quality.

I was the only person in the IT dept a) with a degree in IT and b) with PC experience. So I was immediately the PC expert. But look at the dates 2022 May 20th . 2 days off 30 years with Excel. It’s served me well, by next year I won’t be working and Excel will fade away into the distance. As if! I dream about Excel problems. Excel reconciliations are and will always be the stuff of nightmares for me.

But blimey! 30 years! Excel changed the way the world worked. I know Lotus 1-2-3 was the trailblazer. But Excel is what people got when PC's landed.

One thing I have learnt. 99% of people learn the minimum amount of Excel they need to do their job. If you've read this far, you're one of the 1% who figured, keep learning, every day you learn something makes your job easier. My first 'serious' VBA job. Every day we got a CSV file which had to be copied into a spreadsheet, then various sheets updated. You then had t check totals matched. There were a lot of totals. This took an hour. Then the file had to be went out by 9am. So we had to be in at 8am. I got bored and getting in by 8 was a major hassle due to traffic jams at that time. So I got John Walkenbach's VBA book. And figure out how to do it all in VBA. I built a check sheet with 600 cross references and if any didn't match it 'failed' It loaded the source file, amended formulae, and if the check sheet didn't fail it sent it out via Outlook.

So, I knew it all worked, so one night I set it on a time to start running and as soon as the CSV file landed it started. I rolled in at 9.05am, an hour after everyone else. My manager was apopleptic, where had I been I knew I had to be in at 8 to get the file out. I said to him, check your email, it went out at 8.15. I automated it. He wasn't happy, so I had to leave the Outlook Send out but I could at least get in at 8.55, log on, check the email and send it. The Finance director wasn't happy with the automation, every 3 months I'd get hauled in and told 'you're not checking the file before it goes out' to which i'd reply 'All the checks are built in, there's 600 of them which is more than you could do manually in an hour'.

I'm in a new job. I got to meet the CFO yesterday. I have a load of stuff to do that it repetetive and not well ordered. So I've automated it. Simple things, change all the source data files for all pivot tables in a workbook, change all the pivot tables in a workbook to use the latest month in the data. Copy the same columns to a file which I might have to do 20-30 times. The CFO said who will be able to fix the macros if they go wrong. I've been doing this long enough to know how to write macros that don't go wrong (I was a trained computer programmer (Pascal, Cobol, Basic, Mumps). Anyway I just said google it. That's how I learn't so much stuff. But it minded me, some companies insist on VBA as a minimum requirement, That just makes so much sense. And yes, I haven't got several jobs because my VBA wasn't up to scratch.

But anyway, I'm glad I learnt it. There's some stuff I'm proud of, most of all a utility to copy tables and charts from Excel to PowerPoint. Word didn't work you needed bookmarks that most Word users wouldn't know. But PP, that was brilliant, an hour copying pasting 30+ tables and charts and resizing then deleting the old one and moving the new one to the right place - with a macro Boom! Done in 30 secs. I might have had to do that 6 times a day for 3 months. And it never crashed once.

 

[Joe4]

I don't remember the exact date, but I started using Excel in 1994, but really didn't start to dabble into VBA until about 6 years later.
Like many others, this site helped me greatly as I dove deeper into VBA.
I did use LOTUS 1-2-3 for a short while before Excel, with an internship I had.

 

[Johnny C]

It wasn't VBA back then, you had specific macro sheets I've still got my first macro, pyjama papers. In those days you ordered printouts, they were printed in paper with every other line darkened. It made it easy to read across the page. Cue Excel and laser printers, so I thought I'd write a macro to colour every other line light grey. And so started a life of macros.

 

[Rick Rothstein]

My involvement with Excel is rather strange. I originally started volunteering answering question about the original version of Visual Basic in online in newgroups (the predecessor to forums for you young'uns out there) about 1999 or so. Microsoft was nice enough to award me MVP status in 2002 for my efforts and renewed the award year after year. When Microsoft brought out the dotNET version of Visual Basic, I HATED IT! People still asked questions about the original version of Visual Basic but the number doing so declined over time, so I figured if I wanted to continue volunteering, I would need to find a new vehicle to so with. Being a graduate math major in college and a practicing Civil Engineer in my work life, I figured Excel with its built-in VBA would be the closest fit (Visual Basic and numerical manipulations, what could be better). So I taught myself the underlying Excel object model and began answering question in both Visual Basic and Excel. After a couple of years of this, I asked Microsoft if I could have my MVP discipline switched from Visual Basic to Excel. They conducted a review and agreed my volunteer efforts in Excel met their MVP criteria and switched my discipline to Excel for which I have had my MVP status re-awarded every year since. Nineteen consecutive years in total between the two disciplines so far. Remember at the beginning when I said my involvement with Excel is rather strange? The reason is in all these years, I have never actually used Excel for any actual work (we had programs on our UNIX mini-computer for work related needs). I have only used Excel to answer other people's questions and that is it. I think that may make me the only Microsoft MVP who has no practical experience with the product for whose discipline his MVP status was awarded.

 

[Johnny C]

That is weird Rick! I guess knowing the object model helps but I can't imagine getting into the weird corners, where Excel/ VBA doesn't behave like you'd expect without a workbook behaving badly.
I'm fundamentally efficient (or lazy according to my wife) and it just made sense to me to automate the boring repetetive stuff.
What I find aggravating is that in my world - accountancy - people who are highly intelligent and highly qualified (Masters level) with a professional qualification that takes years, learn the minimum they need to get by with the tool they use most, Excel. Few get past Vlookup.
I just had a meeting with our new CFO. I've streamlined what I do, so things take a couple of minutes rather than hour. The CFO said, what happens when you leave, if a macro falls over. Well I'm a trained programmer so that's not likely, but they'd just have to either Google it or just do what the VBA did manually.
Rant over! I just can't believe that, Excel has moved on 30 + years since vlookup, I've kept up but nobody else seems to. There are literally 3 people in the hundreds of people I've worked with who have gone beyond vlookup. 2 who use Index Match.

 

[igold]

In 1992 I was working for an Institutional Pharmacy as a Purchasing Manager. One day some guy from the IT department came into my office and set up a computer on my desk, and then just left. I can remember that it had Windows and Excel/Word (perhaps other apps as well). I started fooling around in Excel, but had no clue.

 

[RoryA]

It wasn't VBA back then

Excel actually got VBA in 1993 with Excel 5.

 

[Johnny C]

Yeah Rory. I started out on macro 4 sheets. My first macro, pyjama paper - colour every other line grey. Since then. Copy charts/tables to a PowerPoint. Load multiple files, claims, payments, generate bank account claimants/payments, generate intelligent instructions to fix things. Load and error test 2,500 excel files. I've done some 'heavy lifting', some stuff I'm proud of.

 

[Dan_W]

Thank you so much for starting this thread and sharing your story - I am forever interested in how people first got into VBA and why they continued to use it. As a lawyer, unsurprisingly, there is no expectation that I can use VBA (or that I should even have ever heard of it) - and the natural reaction of lawyers to Excel is to instantly recoil and hiss at it ("Why on Earth would you waste your time with Excel when a Word table will do?"). I first discovered it at work by chance in 2016 when someone came in to demonstrate a script that indexed a folder of PDF files... it was revolutionary, because the method of indexing files that partner had decided to adopt was to get a trainee to sit there over the and copytype the filenames of all 1800 pdf files.... so VBA was the better method....

I was the only person in the IT dept a) with a degree in IT and b) with PC experience.

I'm a bit fixated with this sentence, to be honest. What did the rest of the IT department do/what were their backgrounds? I suppose that there is (and certainly was) more to 'IT' than computers, but still ... I find it fascinating.

Excel actually got VBA in 1993 with Excel 5.

@RoryA - Does this mean that VBA is turning 30 next year? I wonder if Microsoft will surprise us all with a major update to VBA and the IDE to mark the special occasion....

My involvement with Excel is rather strange. I originally started volunteering answering question about the original version of Visual Basic in online in newgroups (the predecessor to forums for you young'uns out there) about 1999 or so. Microsoft was nice enough to award me MVP status in 2002 for my efforts and renewed the award year after year. When Microsoft brought out the dotNET version of Visual Basic, I HATED IT! People still asked questions about the original version of Visual Basic but the number doing so declined over time, so I figured if I wanted to continue volunteering, I would need to find a new vehicle to so with. Being a graduate math major in college and a practicing Civil Engineer in my work life, I figured Excel with its built-in VBA would be the closest fit (Visual Basic and numerical manipulations, what could be better)

I was read some advice re: self-study of VBA that when you feel like you've run out of resources, pick up one of the VB books. At the time, I thought this meant dotNET, and so figured it would be one of things I'd get to eventually. Then I discovered that they meant VB6, and since then, I'd say that my personal journey is perhaps the reverse of yours, @Rick Rothstein - I've started exploring VB6 and all the source code out there (and there's a lot). I had no idea that VBA and VB6 were so similar/the same language (depending on definition of 'similar' and 'same'), and my current ongoing hobby project is making a VB6->VBA project converter. This is not especially easy when you have a 64bit version of Office (and all the source code is in 32bit), you don't have (nor have you ever had) a copy of VB6 to try the code out on, and a growing realisation that there are many, many things that VBA does not have that is otherwise available in VB6.

I've been hearing that VBA is a dead language since I started learning it around this time - does anyone with more than my 6 years remember the first time they remember hearing this being said?

 

[RoryA]

Does this mean that VBA is turning 30 next year? I wonder if Microsoft will surprise us all with a major update to VBA and the IDE to mark the special occasion....

I guess so. And I'm pretty sure, no. In that order.