Begin by opening a new sheet in Excel. Click "File" and go to the bottom left and press "Options". Click the "Customize Ribbon" button. Go to the right side panel and click the check box that says "Developer".
Click the "Trust Center" button in the far left side bar and go to "Trust Center Settings...". From here click "Macro Settings" button in the new left side bar and select "Enable all macros" and check the box beneath that says "Trust access to the VBA project object model". Click the "Ok"s at the bottom of the menu.
I can sense your eagerness. Calm down. There are a few more steps.
From here, go to the "Developer" tab and press the "Visual Basic" button. This is what you should see. Right click the folder that says "Microsoft Excel Objects", hover over "Insert" and then press "Module". Double click into the new module that just appeared.
You're almost there.
Copy this spoilered code into the white space to the right.
'start shirking obligations
Sub cmdStart_Click()
Dim x As Long
For x = 1 To 1000000000
Cells(7, 2) = "Running"
Cells(1, 1).Select
SendKeys "{down}"
Application.Wait (Now + TimeValue("0:00:02"))
DoEvents
Next x
End Sub
'stop shirking obligations
Sub cmdStop_Click()
Cells(7, 2) = "Not Running"
End
End Sub
'will automatically set to not running upon opening workbook
Private Sub Workbook_Open()
Cells(7, 2) = "Not Running"
End Sub
_
Home stretch. I can sense that you're ready to give your boss the finger. We're so close.
Close the Visual Basic window and go back to "Sheet1" or whatever it is called. Under the "Developer" tab, press the button that says "Insert" and under the "Form Controls" section select the top left button, which is "Button". Press anywhere in the sheet, hold and drag the mouse to create the button. A menu will appear demanding that you select a macro for the button, select "cmdStart_Click". Do this again with another button to the right but select "cmdStop_Click" in the popup menu. These are your start and stop buttons if that isn't painfully obvious. Rename them if you want, I really don't care.
You're spreadsheet should look like this. Go to "File" and select "Save As". Click "Browse" and save it wherever the fuck you want. The main thing you want to pay attention to is selecting "Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook (*.xlsm)" in the "Save as type:" dropdown. This will let you reuse the workbook.
Congratulations. You're now ready to shirk your obligations at your bullshit job. Have fun. Use it wisely.
I remember one time in the office of the adrenachrome factory in Liberal Mountain, Idaho where we all live I learned how to use VBA and automated hours and hours of bullshit work out. They wanted me to stop because sometimes commas weren't uniform enough and I helped other managers without my manager's express permission. It still makes my blood boil to this day.
My god though, let me tell you, I made some complicated-ass macros. Some cell-based sheets we would use straight up stopped working and the person who created it didn't work there anymore. The IT team was fucking useless for things like this so if I hadn't created a replica that could do the work, we would have been on our asses. I had shit that would run through lists of 100k different items in a database, right? It didn't work fast enough, so I gave it all these badass logic gates that thought about alphabetical orders so it would go "if you're looking at an item that starts with the letter "f" you've gone too far and you're not going to find it." So even the macros that would have run overnight instead of taking a manager several hours out of her day started only taking 2 hours to run by itself - often with more accuracy than a person could do the same project with. They would rather I have spent 10x as long ctrl+f'ing a bunch of items in a list on one sheet and copy+pasting it to another. Holy shit what the fuck?
First "real" job was a position that shouldn't exist in a company that shouldn't exist in an industry that shouldn't exist. It involved doing repetitive work on a computer, is the wrong way to use a computer. Literally I was told to manually move files from one folder to another folder and write them down on a sheet of paper. This had to be done manually because the subfolders in either folders didn't match names, would constant change with people writing messages in the names, and weren't 1-1.
Using VBA I tracked built a database of which folders go to which, scan for files then move them.
I told my coworkers so they could share in the benefit. This was a mistake since it got to my manager who had me automating everything around. We scaled in clients by like 50x and hired only like 2 more people for our department. Everyone in the deptarment as using workbooks with my macros daily even the boss. Those workbooks were all had a client-server relationship to an AccessDB by the end of it.
I never got a dime extra for all that work. This is the job that turned me into a hard core syndicalist. Any work automation you do should be kept as secret as union organizing efforts.
Historic phrase
I'm upper management in supply chain with a billion dollar company, as in anyone on this site that lives in the US has seen our commercials. Our ATP system, "available to promise" aka do we have the product in stock that our customers are buying is an excel sheet that is manually updated every day by a department of eight people. Our sales reps literally might have to stop mid sales pitch if they get a certain ring tone on their phones because a product line has been put on stop sell in their particular region. In 2020.
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This does not surprise me in the slightest since it was what I was automating with VBA. The folder I was moving files from was an sFTP server with ftp user names as sub folders. The other folder was a network drive with the subfolders companies full name (plus ever changing comments).
The reason we couldn't automate this system further was because companies would never obey our file format from understandable to insane degrees. The file format was a stupid .xls format but we would get CSV files saved with the .xls extension or just a completely different format. So after I moved all the files the next step was to go through at "massage" all the data into a format our importer could use.
This was a company accepting employee data from other companies so I got to see just how bad some other companies were at following. I'm talking international tech companies, entire states, and university systems fucking up a basic excel file.
All this meant errors were common which meant more call center temps. Companies would leave us for a smaller competitors only to come back to us after we acquired the competitor.
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"Employee Benefits" are legalized tax evasion. Employers can often make money by offering them because they can put money in an account for an employee that is basically tax limbo. Its not the employees yet so its income tax free. But its not under control of the company so they can count it as "expenses". But at the end of the year and not count it as "earnings".
I came to the same conclusion. There was even a point where I had the philosophical question: if automation made it such that a single person's work day was enough to produce enough food for everyone, why shouldn't everyone be able to eat? Say it's a hyper intelligent AI system with 1,000,000 arms capable of taking care of fields of plants, livestock, etc. and it repaired itself. There was only one engineer needed to make sure the central hub was operational 8 hours a day. Should that much automation be a bad thing? Should we intentionally make it harder to feed people so more people are justified eating? Should only the one person deserve to live? It seemed absurd to me. It wasn't my first "real" job, but this VBA one was the tipping point for me.
I feel like I'd be such a brat that I don't think I could justify to myself WRITING DOWN FILE NAME TRANSFERS. VBA is capable of doing that by itself as a single macro sheet. I'd have probably left.
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