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A comment on Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by folkhack on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @01:57PM (#21326701)
> SendKeys

Holy cow why didn't I know about this 6 months ago =|

VBA is something I have had to reluctantly learn. It's a horrid/ancient language. Sorry if someone gets offended at that but to someone who uses a lot of modern development languages/tools it's just very very difficult with near-zero "nice to haves"... you just end up taking this huge lib of code around with you with functions like "inArray" etc.

> As a program, it was horrible, horrible code. As a useful tool for the business, it was incredible.

That's something that's rough for us engineers but can be hedged with great documentation, both inline and and otherwise =)

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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by alexhutcheson on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @03:07PM (#21327399)
Is anyone aware of a good resource to learn VBA? All the resources I've seen online are either tutorials for very quick hacks, or assume you have 0 programming knowledge. I would love a "VBA for people who are familiar with at least one other programming language".
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by BubRoss on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @04:05PM (#21327990)
You don't have to learn VBA to do this, you can just include windows.h in C and call the SendKeys function.
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by dividedbyzero on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @05:57PM (#21328855)
There's also java.awt.Robot – I've used it a lot for similar things, really neat if you already have Java/Scala code for getting the data to fill in.
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by alexhutcheson on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @05:17PM (#21328580)
I'm interested in scripting stuff in Excel.
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by conductr on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @07:47PM (#21329665)
I’d recommend learning at least one other programming language, then use the tutorials.
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by tudelo on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:43PM (#21327167)
Do you use AutoHotkey ever?
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Re:Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on? by folkhack on Tuesday October 22, 2019 @02:58PM (#21327307)
Yep! Sparingly but for some Windows-based tasks you can't beat it. Also it's a solid solution that has great support/devs behind it so it definitely has a home in my toolbox!
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