I had a quick email query from my brother-in-law at Bremer Ford. He had an Excel spreadsheet that he was having trouble understanding how they’d done it (neither of us could find any VBA code behind it, which confused us no end).
Found a spreadsheet with some arcane formula scratchings, like this:
Modify Data
=DIALOG.BOX(DBMain)
=IF(R[-1]C=FALSE,HALT())
=WORKSPACE(,,TRUE)
The answer is that this is the absolutely ancient way of doing macros in Excel, which is what I suspected. It was introduced in Excel V4, and was replaced by Excel VBA. Excel V4, for the record, was issued in 1992. The modern way to do anything remotely approaching this is VBA applications, although I would never recommend that you put actual source data in Excel – it should be in a database (even MS Access) for robustness and backup purposes, and then you would extract that data to Excel for reporting. The link below has more:
http://j-walk.com/ss/excel/faqs/xl95faq1.htm
And so – problem solvered. I suppose, though, it’s testament to backward compatibility that a 14-year-old macro still works in our version of Excel. I guess, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.