Nice thread, its interesting to see other peoples perspectives..

Back in the day, my 1st real job was doing a bunch of data entry into lotus 123 spread sheets. how i hated that with a passion.

We upgraded from the old 386's to 486's with MS Office on them, which meant we had to re-engineer all the spreadsheets.

I got to thinking that these bloody bits of dead tree had to come from somewhere, i mean being they werent hand written and all..

At the time i worked for $large_corporation with about 25k employees, and given these reports used to magically appear at the begining of each month it was a task at tracking down where they came from..

Eventually i began getting the reports electronically, and to make a medium story shorter, without any programming experience, i managed to (as i know it now) parse the electronic files, put data in the correct sports and turn two weeks of solid data entry into only a few minutes work.

No it wasnt perl, yes it was VBA, yes the code really sucked (the following year i went and started uni, and realised how crap the code was), but it was really a proud moment for me to say to my manager, hey, check this out, what's next on the list of automation?

PS: I ended up writing a reasonably featured hex editor in Excel.. It's amazing the innovation that can occur when yoru machines are locked down tighter than a drum :-)