For the first years of my career I basically lived in the Office Suite. This meant:

• Outlook for email. 

• Outlook for calendar.

• PPT / Excel / Word as absolute lifeblood

‍Now, I’m in the startup google cloud suite: gcal, gmail, sheets, and well slides? When I need it. Even though I’m off the suite to an extent – who am I kidding? Most of my time now is spent in other Microsoft products: Visual Studio Code and Github. In my free time I’m searching for additional VSCode extensions to improve my workflow and the search never ends. Even small things like the color of brackets matching up and standing out in a long javascript function help save time. I guess what my experiences as both a finance professional and now programmer have in common is that – in whatever tools you use for your job – speed matters. Find that next unlock, and it feels great. How was I ever working without a function sticky at the top of VSCode? This is a recently released feature in beta mode that I can’t live without. Similarly, how could you survive as an investment banking analyst without the spreadsheet auto-formatting colors to differentiate linking vs a hardcoded value etc. for you?

Well when I first started programming and working on projects for fun I found myself gravitating back to the suite. In fact, I have a sneaky suspicion that the reason more finance people NEVER want to learn to code and think it’s too complicated is because of the absolute tragedy that is VBA (Visual Basic). By the way, programmers hate it too. VBA is taught in schools. I think I remember learning it in college and thinking Noooooooooo, I don’t want to do this. It’s an annoying language is the issue. In the annual github developer survey I always laugh when it’s on the bottom of the list every year when devs vote on “programming languages they love.”

Here’s the bottom of the list – VBA is number 37 / 38. It’s a shame, too. There’s so much potential for automating things in Excel but if VBA is what you need to use you are certainly going to not build much and instead head over to Google Sheets and their App Scripts — where you can use Javascript. Woosh. That was a close one. 

Here’s the survey which Stack Overflow asked 88K people to vote on their most loved and dreaded programming languages: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted.

VBA-aside, I’ve always been naturally fascinated with understanding the Office Suite. In the projects I was building just for fun included:

• Automating creating PowerPoint files. I’d use an API to get public company information daily and create a presentation that would automatically update. I saw this as being particularly useful for fields like Wealth Management. I was just thinking the other day that this probably has a wider set of applications with the onset of Applied AI and the creative software that will bolster the presentation creation process.

• Writing custom excel functions. You know =ADD(1,2) in Excel? That’s essentially just a JS function that takes in function add(cell1, cell2) { return cell1 + cell2 }. Really simple and cool to see what’s behind the scenes. I remember starting to write custom functions with my own name to explore what you could do with them. I realized in doing so that the Excel extension store is pretty bad. One of the worst limitations is they require you to be an incorporated company to publish anything — like, why? If you want to limit the people contributing to your platform, this is how you do it.

• PPTX vs PPT. Have you ever wondered the difference between the two file names? It turns out that PPT was prehistoric. The “X” stands for XML (an alternative format of storing data on the web, the more popular option of which is JSON). Storing PPT files in XML also seems like a bad idea for encouraging productivity on your platform. Still, apparently before the “X” things were even worse. The structure wasn’t really legible to human eyes. I remember the first time I viewed a PowerPoint as code. It was pretty cool!

  
  

In summary, the Office Suite cannot be ignored and so I think understanding it and building around it is valuable. There are >1B people who use Microsoft’s software. In my mind, Excel is the “killer app” for enterprises. In fact, most SaaS companies are competing with the classic and near free alternative: just doing everything in a spreadsheet! 

In this post I wanted to reflect on some of my experiences learning about the Suite under the hood. The developer experience is really subpar – Google does a much better job at this. Oh and don’t get me started about Microsoft wanting you as a developer to use their C# language! The language was invented at Microsoft in 2000. Yeah right! However, what I did learn from exploring the Suite is that you can’t ignore it. Business users don’t care about developer experience. They just care about reliability. That Microsoft does very well. People spend a surprising amount of time working in these products. I know I did.