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submitted 5 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] lengau@midwest.social 20 points 5 months ago

If you are, like I once was, the poor fool who has to maintain a bunch of VBA macros... Extract them into files and source control those. Make a script to extract them and to put them back, and use git-lfs for the actual workbook if you need a template workbook.

Now pardon me, I need to add this to the agenda for my next therapy.

[-] petersr@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago

I will join that therapy session. This is pretty much what we did, except LFS, since it was "a requirement" to also track what they layouting of the Excel file was like.

And even extracting and inserting the code was not stable. Excel will arbitrarily change the casing of ".path" to ".Path" for no reason and add and remove whitespace between functions as it see fit. It was such a pain. We also had a hard time handling unicode strings for instance containing a degree sign. And the list goes on.

[-] PlexSheep@infosec.pub 3 points 5 months ago

Perhaps M$ does that specifically to make it hard to work with their formats? That way, tools like libre office stay not 100% compatible, preserving their market share.

[-] petersr@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

I hear ya. But to be honest, what they are doing here is fine, and doesn't seem malicious. There is an Open Document specification and they stick to it, but the spec doesn't enforce everything. For instance for the ordering of certain elements on the page, I bet you they store store those elements in memory in an efficient data structure where ordering doesn't matter, so when writing out the memory to disk, the easiest for them to do is just write it out in what order it appears in their data structure.

But there are probably other cases where they are not so innocent.