[yreg]

A long, long time ago I worked on a small project for a major multinational grocery chain.

I made them a tool that parses an Excel file with a specific structure and calls some endpoints in their internal system to submit the data.

I was curious, so I asked how they are doing it currently. They led me to a computer at the back of their office. The wallpaper had two rectangles, one of them said MS EXCEL and the other said INTERNET EXPLORER. Then the person opened these apps, carefully positioned both windows exactly into those rectangles and ran some auto-clicker - the kind cheaters would use in RuneScape – which moved the cursor and copied and pasted the values from the Excel into the various forms on the website.

Amazing.

[Valgrim]

I worked with a client who used a multi-millon dollar system for moving goods automatically into packaging stations. The system was built and maintained by a major european company. All the data was transfered automatically between systems normally, but one day, for some reason, there was an internal communication error inside the machine which caused a lot of packages to be sent without being recorded as such.

Now normally we would just have contacted the company and asked them for a data extraction so we could cross-reference the data. But since it wasn't clear who was at fault, and we knew it would take weeks for that extraction, we looked for an internal solution first.

Now there was a subsystem in the machine that worked only in Internet Explorer, with an old authentication scheme, that we could use to see the information we needed, so I, being the only person in the team without formal analysis training but having made my way there from a clerk job, knew exactly what to do.

I fired up the old IE, Excel, wrote in 5 minutes a VBA script that did exactly what you described, click there copy that etc, and 30 minutes later we had our extraction, and resolved the issue completely before the packages were even shipped.

All hail Excel.

[mst]

For all its flaws as a programming language, VBA made an excellent bodging language and I salute your expedient field hack.

[kspacewalk2]

I wonder if it used something like AutoIt[0]. I remember using it at one of my more boring co-op jobs about 20 years ago to automate moving data between a spreadsheet and some obscure database product.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoIt