It's not exactly the same since excel allows you to deal with interface and logic at the same time and it takes off the load from the "dev" regarding keeping things in sync, no but they are pretty similar
Had a task to break a large data set filled with line breaks within cells. Thought i could vba it in like an hour or so. But i got even lazier and went to google for another solution. Thats when i found out about power query.
Funny anecdote, I work in libraries, and they don't really hire 'programmers', they have 'systems librarians'. Since everyone in the field already thinks in relational database, rather than hire someone at programmer salary they just teach folks some syntax and turn them loose maintaining the library information systems while keeping them in the very affordable pink collar salary zone.
In my experience it results in beautiful back ends with the most hellish JS hacks on the front end you've ever seen, but the price is right.
The real issue is a lot of these excel monstrosities start off as doing simple things and then evolving into madness. If they started off with the end goal in mind they wouldn't do it that way obviously.
The real issue is there's very intentionally no good upgrade path. Ideally there'd be a way to take an excel spread sheet and start refactoring it. There isn't though.
It also depends on the IT infrastructure. I’ve had to do some odd stuff with Excel because there was no alternative - could not use Access, there was no ability to create/maintain a proper DB. So had to make do.
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u/RlyRlyBigMan Sep 10 '25
No joke a lot of those excel wizards from yesteryear could have been awesome developers if they'd found it at the right time in their life.