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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

C# with WPF or WinForms only seems nice in comparison to other relatively painful tools IMO.

The old RAD graphical tools and newer ones like Rebol (that are now dated) show just what is possible. Mathematica is also pretty powerful and doesn't require a ton of code.

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Totally agree with this.

I’ll get shot for this one but I write most of my GUIs in Excel these days.

Do you mean Visual Basic for Applications? How are you creating a GUI in Excel?

I think there is a thing called Microsoft Office development kit or some other name that allows C# and other .Net programs to manipulate Office apps. Not sure if it's what the author meant, though.

Oh, I have used OLE (or some iteration thereof) to drive Excel from Python. That was a long time ago, but it sounds similar. I wasn't really doing GUI, though - I was using code to build spreadsheets from data files.

I had something I wrote in the 90s I wasn't proud of that was a word macro that read Excel sheets for a list of instructions and used those to compose documents and print them. I feel sick thinking about it.

Reminds me of Moe on the Simpsons saying I've done things I'm not proud of. And the things I am proud of are disgusting.

You should be proud like that.

I remember using Office Interop back in the day

Less useful these days as we use open formats, ie doc is propriatery, docx is open

Mostly just locking fields. I don’t do anything procedural. It’s usually calculators, stats and modelling stuff.

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