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Comment by cowabunga | Hacker News Reader

In my sector (finance), literally everyone has some automation junk set up somewhere. They're usually written by one person and mailed around or stuck on fileservers somewhere or copied off a website somewhere badly.

It's surprisingly common. Even my wife who is a complete luddite has a couple of scripts for excel she copied off a web site to do a tax calculation.

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I "love" when those things break and the original author left the company a decade ago... ugh.

...and then you get handed it to fix and find zero comments, undeclared variables (often single letters), and then 70 lines of "sheet scrolling" followed by the same loop 3 times in some internal function evidencing that half of it was done by macro record.

Not bitter at all. Nope.

That was my day today I.e. untangling one of those bags of shit that someone had tangled even more by converting it to a VSTO add in.

It's now a nice clean late-bound C# command line tool and powershell cmdlet.

The scripting in Google drive is pretty awesome. I saw some pretty impressive automation recently that a business analyst did where he'd grab spreadsheet attachments to emails in Gmail and analyze them in sheets.

Well it's awesome until you want to leave or want support or thought wave was good or one of your users violates their ToS and they take your entire account out before you are even notified or its down for a few hours when you're about to drop a big presentation to that client or you find out that local legislation changes make it illegal to export data out of the EU or you're somewhere with a basic GPRS connection or none whatsoever.

These are all real problems I've had to work around.

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