3Types

Many of my programs involve pulling data from our data warehouse, manipulating it a bit, and presenting the results to the user. Because it can time to get data out of the data warehouse (anywhere from a few seconds to 30 minutes for more complicated queries), the program can easily look like its frozen while the user is waiting. In the case of Excel macros, a running query can freeze up not only Excel, but make the whole computer seem sluggish.
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I recently realized that next month (January, 2009) will mark my 30th anniversary in publishing.

I got my first publishing job in January, 1979, when I interviewed with the personnel director at G. P. Putnam’s. I had decided that there was no point in continuing with my graduate school studies (the job market was awful, and I was getting pretty tired of academia), so I had this vague notion of becoming an editor.

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One of the programs that I’m happiest with is an Excel add-in that I call Sales Macros. It’s a set of Excel macros that I wrote to automate all sorts of tasks commonly performed by folks in the Sales department.

We have several different online systems that will provide information about our titles - but most of them work on one title at a time. So if a rep or a sales assistant needs, say, updated prices for a spreadsheet full of titles, she would need to look up each title individually. But with Sales Macros, the whole spreadsheet can be filled in with a single operation!

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