All,

I've been meaning to submit my gratitude to the forum with a post for some time now. I am finally getting around to it...

My Excel Journey has transformed. Its maturing very very quickly... You know... Unfortunately, we can only ever use what we know. Nothing more. Like most people, I started with formula based applications. I loved it. The first time I created a useful application in Excel with formulas and lookup functions, I thought I was a big time developer!! (Not really - but I was hooked). Fast forward a year or two, I began to dabble with VBA and by "dabble" I mean, I would paste code from forums much like this, link them to buttons, tweak some variables and I had a little bit more functionality. It was cool.

But I faced a problem. I quickly began to reach the limitations of a formula-based application. Wildly inefficient and spaghetti-like structure is now some of the problems I am dealing with while maintaining current projects. Perhaps the worst of these problems though is performance. I was creating spreadsheets with far too long of calculation times. Nonetheless, I had a comprehensive understanding of where Excel performs well and what will bog it down, which today has become valuable information... But I was just pushing the limits of this type of application and eventually it wouldn't be feasible.

About 6 months ago, I set out to create an ERP program, with no intentions of distributing it. No real purpose other than I would consider using it someday in my own business environment... At the start of this project my notion was "I would do this in Excel!". I spent a considerable amount of time learning VBA and how to link Userform controls to cell values, etc. I started playing with the FSO classes and writing files to the local disk. I was hooked once again! But many lines of code later, I reached the "comfortable limitations" of a Userform based application in Excel. And mostly that was because I was trying to use Excel like a database, and spreadsheet columns just weren't THAT... One added field (i.e. column) and massive re-writes of code were required. Just time consuming.

I was at a crossroads. I had heard of MS Access, but wasn't sure if the learning curve would be something I could take on... I did some digging and once again, expanded my horizons... I started using ADO and connecting to an MS Access database from my Excel ERP. This was much better. But I still found the UI of Excel's userforms a bit... outdated. And I just wasn't happy overall with what I was creating. I couldn't pinpoint it, but I just felt like my work wasn't paying off. It was absolutely critical that the architecture or platform that I chose for this project was set in stone. It was a commitment. I will spend years developing this project and would eventually have to live with my decisions. Moral of the story: make the right decision before its too late!

Once again, at a crossroads, I decided to completely re-start from scratch with MS Access. I am now developing this ERP fully in Access and I am finding it so much nicer than what I could do with Excel. I love it and I am learning exponentially fast. The methods and properties are a bit different and sometimes frustrating, but for the most part the transition has been seamless.

So, concluding this late night (or early morning) post, I wanted to say thank you to many of the consistent members here who have helped me with my various Excel formula, vba, and charting questions over the past year. The feedback on this forum is like no other. Its instantaneous and the solutions are usually better than I imagine... I would not be where I am today in my programming and application development experiences had I not learned so much from the valuable members of this community.

I now officially know enough to be dangerous - my greatness and probably... my demise lol

Thank you,

Sincerely