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egilh project #7: Excel 95

What: Started the translation work on Excel 95 but I quickly moved on to Windows 95 as I got the chance to work on technical issues instead of translations. One of the few things I accomplished was to improve the slow Excel macros. Version 1 first sorted the list and then used a binary lookup to make it many, many, times faster as the lists were large. The second version skipped macros altogether and used a binary tree in C to translate flat text files.

When: mid 90s

Lessons learned:

• Marketing people don't understand programmers. They insisted on translating Visual Basic for Applications. if then/else is a 'universal' language as far as I'm concerned. At least they had the common sense not to repeat the mistake with the more serious languages.


• The Dutch make lasagna with bananas (!) and the Irish serve French Fries with theirs


• You can learn a lot from Dr. Dobbs