My usual approach when I reach the limit of my excel skills (and patience) is to save as csv, write a Python script to do the job, import back in excel for the graphs. This looks like it could nicely streamline the process, granted I learn a bit of C# (any excuse to pick up a new language I guess). Looking forward to try the tool the next time I battle a budget forecasting file. And kudos for the well-written and funny article.
This may sound weird but my go-to these days for text munging is actually PHP. Set it up as a shell script, do all your testing on the command line, and then if it's something you use a lot (or other people could use), throw it on a server somewhere with a web form at the front end to make it more accessible.
Not for anything serious, but great for those occasional quick-hack utilities to save you a bunch of cut-and-pasting or data reformatting.
If you're already exporting to CSV, why bring it back in for the graphing? There are plenty of decent python graphing libraries. Or if you hated all of those, you could always just use R, which will make basically any graph you could ever need (...and do the data analysis for you too).
Because excel files are the lingua Franca of the corporate world. Much easier to share an excel file with the numbers formatted to HR/finance/management expectations and a few graphs (which they can modify to their liking if necessary), than a word file with embedded graphics and tables (which they can’t change so they’ll ask you to redo the graphs in puce or whatever). Or god forbid a jupyter notebook... FWIW I worked once with a network graphing tool for a fairly involved HR topic (mapping out all possible career paths within an engineering department) and I spent half my time learning the tool, and the other half exporting images and importing them in PowerPoint.
Let me know if I can help with trying it out. I'm in the "do-things-that=don't-scale" mode, at least until I save up for my mansion, so please feel free to make use of it!
