[johnminter]

Over the last couple of years I have migrated my workflow away from MS Office products (Word/Excel/VBA/PowerPoint) to LaTeX, R, Sweave/knitr.

These tools play well with git and make it easy to automate an analysis. I am a strong believer in literate programming - embedding the code in the documentation where feasible. There are case where it is not (long Monte Carlo simulations) but I can at least pull in the results and have the source code that generated them in version control and the report automatically uses the latest version.

Microsoft kept changing VBA and each release would break things. We had third party tools that had locked VBA modules and ours just wouldn't permit processing data in these workbooks.

I can extract all the data with R and am much happier. The Open Source community seems to better support their products than Microsoft. Go figure...