Someone needs to create Spreadsheets Anonymous and share the crazy stuff people do in Excel, the best one I've seen
is a full GUI wizard (back, next etc.) in VBA.
You opened the "spreadsheet", which hid Excel itself and showed a form. You filled it out, clicked Send and it used your local Outlook client to email a copy of itself to your boss, who then opened it and was presented with another form for approval, etc, up through finance and finally to the person who wrote the check.
It was amazingly ugly and fragile, and of course, there was no way for anyone to see the state of the system (because the 'state' was distributed among the entire workforce's Exchange inboxes!).
Want to know the status of your check request? No problem, simply call everyone who might have been in the approval chain and ask them to search their inboxes. Hope you find the most current person!
(updated to correct the name of the software)
When I started, almost every process was based around Access, using queries made using the query builder. With some basic scripting I managed to cut a couple of man-months of work down into about an hour or two of work a month. The entire thing is more fragile than a stack of cards though.
At this point I could literally write a 200 page dissertation on all of the reasons why this is a bad idea. But it works, and it is cheap. So there you go.
An excel form / outlook workflow would have been an improvement.
I miss using machinations in MS Access back in the day. Now with Google Sheets, I am left wonting for a tool that enforces primary keys and is /easy/ to set up a view or query.