You would be surprised how many people have done this. The average office worker doesn't have a development environment on their computer, but they have Excel, and they have a coworker who was a whiz who said, "Did you know you could do this?"
They just kept automating task after task, silently, without the IT department ever knowing. 90% of them never thought of it as coding, and 10% realized they could make more money as an expert who knows how to coerce excel combined with their domain knowledge than they could as a programmer.
I've been at top 20 banks in the world that run 14 hour jobs in Excel that import data from web services, run analysis, and FTP result sets elsewhere. They were used to analyze risk on tens of billions of dollars worth of securities.
They were riddled with bugs, but it let the front-line traders iterate quickly and prototype something that the backend team (my team) could turn into a "real" reporting process.
Absolutely. I think it is the rapid prototyping aspect of spreadsheets that is perhaps the most powerful. For analysing large amounts of data they are obviously not great. But they excel (pardon the pun) at providing an environment in which to quickly formulate and visualise numerical models - because they are reactive so you can see what happens when you change inputs - without having to recompile, or manually rerun code.
I've done this a lot. I've always programmed but I'd say the most used things I've ever done are Excel workbooks. It's great, you don't really have to worry too much about compatibility. You're never like hey install this program so you can use this other program. I don't have to make a 'ui'.
Sure they're prone to breakage, they're kind of fiddly and inelegant. But they work and get the work done which is what I need to do at the end of the day.
And all these little macros could be one of the largest sources of increased productivity attributable to computers in history. Maybe even _the_ largest. I'm completely serious.
I've seen office workflows sped up by 20X or more with a little 1-2-3 or Excel macro hacking. Everyday minor miracles to the people who previously slaved at manually munging data. A student intern spends a few hours one day on macros, and the office staff each save three hours every day for years to come.
The spreadsheet has always and will always be the killer app of the PC.
"If you have been doing programming in excel for the past 20 years then you are simply a fool - sorry."
You've got to be kidding! Excel programmers rarely worry about the next paycheck. Programming in Excel may not be the most invigorating intellectual pursuit but it's a helluva steady job - there's always something that needs fixing!
I remember tweaking Excel input 'system' and decorate a spreadsheet with additional hints and checks so I can go furiously fast on a very large input-operator level task.
This stencila thing seems to be a marriage of the two: you enter your data in a spreadsheet type environment, and then you can write a reactive document backed by that data.
Without Excel there would be no way for my sales/marketing team to give me valuable data to process at the backend.
If you have been doing programming in excel for the past 20 years then you are simply a fool - sorry.