I’ve been waiting two weeks for an Excel file I need for a mid-month report. The one person who can generate it is buried, so fair enough. It used to take him an hour. Now, with our carefully monitored AI “efficiency,” it takes about six days.
It finally arrives—fully merged and centered like it’s trying to win a design award. Undoing that one cell at a time is now my personality.
Meanwhile, I’m no longer allowed to use VBA, so I asked AI for an alternative. It suggested… VBA. I tried its version anyway. It converted everything into a table with hard-coded colors, so now adding a row requires manual painting. A bold step backward.
I would fix it properly, but the shade of blue must be exact or we trigger a departmental post-mortem on “lessons learned.” No one knows what the hex code means, but we respect it deeply.
At some point, I ask a coworker a question. He answers in 30 seconds, clearly, and wishes me a nice day. A glimpse of civilization.
Now my work is somewhere between my boss, her boss, and a VP who reports to the CEO. I’m waiting on feedback for something that used to take an hour and now takes a week.
Looking forward to next month.
An hour to six days is bad. There must be some kind of data ingestion and pipeline involved. Reading a database and generating a formatted xlsx file can be a few seconds to minutes.
An OpenXML library could modify and write to a new file without Excel. Microsoft’s version is usually for C#, there are similar libraries in other programming languages if your computer is locked down. If Excel gives a corrupted error when opening, the XML data can be viewed by renaming the xlsx extension to zip.
Merging Cells: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/documentformat.openxml.spreadsheet.mergecells?view=openxml-3.0.1
Cell style and background color: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44839512/how-to-work-with-style-index-in-open-xml
If missing the point was an art, you’d be Michelangelo.