OT: Excel Macro tip

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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You can skip the story by reading the last paragraph if you are in a hurry.

I can never let “good enough” alone and, despite not having any insurmountable problems with the PC I bought a bit after retiring in 2012 (and which had been enhanced with more ram, a couple of video boards, an SSD “C” drive, Win 10 and Office 2016), I decided to buy a replacement (induced by what seemed like a really good price at Costco for an HP “Envy” running Win 11 (Home).

The good news is that it came with 32GB ram, a 1TB SSD, 12th Gen Intel® Core i7-12700F (12-Core) CPU, NVIDIA® GeForce GTX™ 1660 SUPER 6GB “gamer” video board, Wi-Fi 6 (2x2/160) Gig+ and Bluetooth® 5.2 and a Wireless Keyboard and Mouse.

The bad news is that, apparently the word “Envy” is used in the same context that “Giant Economy Size” means “Small”. For a machine with “gamer” specs, the A/V ports were the basic stereo jack and a microphone port, so its only remaining expansion slot is now occupied by a relatively inexpensive sound board from Asus with a fiber output port. The other hardware additions were an additional 1TB SSD (as I never keep documents, etc. on my operating system drive) along with moving my external drives, keyboard and mouse from my existing PC.

Now for the software - because I wanted to continue using my old PC as a backup, I needed another copy of MS Office and I wanted to shift the OS from the “Home” version to the “Pro” version so I could use Bitlocker to encrypt my drives. I found that there is a whole software industry openly selling legal license keys (presumably bought in bulk from Microsoft) at huge discounts. This brought the price of the software way down. So I figured, I’d go to Office Professional 2021 along with Win 12 Pro.

Everything worked out fine … but

The speed of my Macro-driven Excel file that I keep my portfolio on (which reaches out to Google and Yahoo when I hit a button to update real-time) slowed from taking about 5 seconds to taking about two minutes to update (despite the fact that hardware-wise I had upgraded from a Lexus to a Lamborghini).

After reading page after page of arcane gobbledygook of people with the same problem asking for advice and being given all sorts of excuses, I came across the solution - which hopefully someone here will find useful some day:

MAKING EXCEL MACROs WORK FASTER

If not already there, add “Developer” tab to Excel by using File, Option, Ribbon Cable and adding it
Then go to the Developer tab … Macro Security… Trusted Locations.
Then added the directory of the Excel file with the macro to the Trusted location list
Close Excel and then the macro should run at full speed when you reopen it

Jeff

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I used to be an Excel fan in the early days until Excel v 5 came out. I had a difficult time with it so I asked Microsoft for help. When they found out that I was from Venezuela they told me to contact my local Excel dealer. Being in the business I knew they didn’t know their back end from a black hole. I was so pissed off that I have never again used Excel. I’m quite happy to use crappy LibreOffice.

Moral of the story: Don’t piss off your paying customers.

The Captain

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I used to be an Excel fan in the early days until Excel v 5 came out. I had a difficult time with it so I asked Microsoft for help. When they found out that I was from Venezuela they told me to contact my local Excel dealer. Being in the business I knew they didn’t know their back end from a black hole. I was so pissed off that I have never again used Excel.

I’m quite happy to use crappy LibreOffice.

Moral of the story: Don’t piss off your paying customers.

Announced today for the quarter ending June 30, Microsoft generated $16.7 billion in net income on $51.9 billion in revenue (growing 16% yoy in constant currency) for a 32% net income margin, so looks like Microsoft is writing quite a nice story. Their Azure business is growing 46% in constant currency. They must have some happy, paying customers somewhere. Everywhere?

4 Likes
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Announced today for the quarter ending June 30, Microsoft generated $16.7 billion in net income on $51.9 billion in revenue (growing 16% yoy in constant currency) for a 32% net income margin, so looks like Microsoft is writing quite a nice story. Their Azure business is growing 46% in constant currency. They must have some happy, paying customers somewhere. Everywhere?

You have an MBA?

The Captain

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I used to be an Excel fan in the early days until Excel v 5 came out. I had a difficult time with it so I asked Microsoft for help. When they found out that I was from Venezuela they told me to contact my local Excel dealer. Being in the business I knew they didn’t know their back end from a black hole. I was so pissed off that I have never again used Excel.

I’m quite happy to use crappy LibreOffice.

Moral of the story: Don’t piss off your paying customers.

Announced today for the quarter ending June 30, Microsoft generated $16.7 billion in net income on $51.9 billion in revenue (growing 16% yoy in constant currency) for a 32% net income margin, so looks like Microsoft is writing quite a nice story. Their Azure business is growing 46% in constant currency. They must have some happy, paying customers somewhere. Everywhere?

You have an MBA?

The Captain

Do you mean Microsoft Best-in-class Admiration? Yes, I have a bit of that.

As this is an investing board and not a social board (those were deleted), here’s another data point from the conference call:
The Microsoft CFO said “We expect Azure revenue growth to be sequentially lower by roughly 3 points on a constant currency basis.” which translates to 43% (= 46% - 3%) yoy growth for the Sep quarter.

In addition to their customers, Microsoft shareholders are also happy as MSFT was up about 5% today before the Fed announcement and up further after.

More on Microsoft and Google results is here (https://boards.fool.com/msft-goog-cloud-growth-strong-351478…).

High growth in cloud computing continues as a major macro trend.

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Do you mean Microsoft Best-in-class Admiration? Yes, I have a bit of that.

Great reply! :wink:

As this is an investing board and not a social board (those were deleted), here’s another data point from the conference call:

As investors it’s results that count:

MSFT vs. TSLA: https://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/advchart/frames/frames.asp…

I have been using spreadsheets almost since day one, long before Microsoft developed Excel, the king of spreadsheets. In 1979 I was using VisiCalc on an Apple ][ to help me manage my insurance portfolio. I greatly admired Bill Gates for stealing IBM’s thunder with MS-DOS and Windoze. I have stated that Microsoft was kinder to its developers than Apple having been a Certified Developer for both companies’ products (Mac & Excel).

I have promoted MSFT over INTC: https://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/advchart/frames/frames.asp…

My company also developed a Help for Excel product! When we found a bug in Excel they explained to me why they would not fix that bug. It was so rare that we were probably the only people affected by it and it would cost Microsoft over 100 grand to fix it. They suggested we write a workaround. We already had. A couple of years earlier we pointed out to Apple that Excel was not following Apple’s User Interface Guidelines with Cut/Copy/Paste. They called up Redmond and told Microsoft to fix it!

None of the above has anything to do with my choice of where to spend my money.

I think we can give this thread a rest. :wink:

The Captain

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When we found a bug in Excel they explained to me why they would not fix that bug. It was so rare that we were probably the only people affected by it and it would cost Microsoft over 100 grand to fix it.

Hey, I did something similar, except it was an unusually-encountered bug in Access. I reported it to Microsoft. They acknowledged it and thanked me, but it was unfixed in at least the next two versions - I can’t say about versions after Office 2007.

(Create a report. In the detail section, put a textbox that is allowed to grow to fit the contents. Also, mark the detail section to stay on one page. Now put in some data, that will go in the textbox, that is too long to fit on the page. Result: infinite loop - I think it’s generating page after page, all the same size, looking for a bigger one. Workaround: do NOT mark the detail section to stay on one page. Instead, put in a control break - below all the others - that will trigger on every record, and mark IT to keep the group together.)

1 Like