Jorge – I’ve heard it said that laziness is the mother of all inventions, which may be true. I know for me, laziness is why I got started programming. Back in the old days of Excel 4, I had this technique I used to model material deformation behavior, and it required iteration between two Solver loops, one for loading and the other for unloading. You had to run alternative Solver simulations on each part until the difference between them was less than some small acceptable error, which meant probably a total of a dozen or so Solver loops, and you had th change all of the constraints and target cells and changing cells each time. Then repeat for a total of a dozen cases. So let’s say 144 Solver loops, each set up manually. This took more than half a day to do by hand, and it was tedious as hell, almost as tedious as this description. Anyway, I spent a couple weeks in Excel with the XLM manual in my lap, and I automated the sucker, and finally it ran in about two minutes. When I got Excel 97, this was my first VBA project, and it was hard, but I got the time down to ten or fifteen seconds. There was no turning back.

Derek, believe me, I am not a programmer, and I don’t go much beyond the examples above, but once you start automating some tasks with recorded macros you will not turn back. There are many things that you simply can’t do without VBA (like stupid and repetitive tasks and user interfaces).