microsoft.public.excel.programming

The group and its era

The address looks like Usenet and behaved like Usenet, but this group was never part of the Big-8 hierarchies created by public proposal and vote, nor of the unpoliced alt.* that grew up beside them. Microsoft created the microsoft.public.* groups itself and ran them on a news server of its own, msnews.microsoft.com, with a parallel private hierarchy for resellers and other partners. What made the distinction easy to miss is that the public half was fed outwards: ordinary news servers carried the groups and passed articles back, so a subscriber saw microsoft.public.excel.programming in the same group list as comp.* and alt.*, read it in the same newsreader, and had no particular reason to notice whose machine held the master copy. By the end the public hierarchy ran to more than two thousand groups covering the company’s products.

The answering was volunteer work, and Microsoft recognised it through the Most Valuable Professional programme, an award that grew out of the company’s peer-support communities on CompuServe and Usenet and is re-earned each year on the previous twelve months of contribution. MVPs were among the regular answerers in the Excel programming groups. The house style is the reason the archive still earns citations: a question typically got back a complete, runnable code fragment rather than a hint, with a short explanation of why it worked and what would break it — written in public, quotable by anyone, and therefore reusable long after the thread had scrolled away.

What was discussed

Excel had been programmable before Visual Basic for Applications arrived: XLM, a macro language written in formula syntax on special macro sheets, was the default through Excel 4.0. VBA came with Excel 5.0 in 1993 and became the way work was done, though XLM never quite went away and later versions went on running it. Inheriting a sheet whose macros predate the change, and deciding whether to translate or leave well alone, was a recurring kind of question here.

Much of what was asked sat at the join between the spreadsheet and the code. The object model — the vocabulary of workbooks, worksheets, ranges and their methods — is large, and a good deal of the answering amounted to showing which of several plausible routes through it was the fast one. So did the standing question of whether a problem wanted code at all, since a worksheet formula often did the job and kept the file simpler. Beyond that the subject matter divided along familiar lines:

• automation across applications, driving Word, Access or Outlook from Excel and the reverse, and the reference and object-lifetime problems that came with it;
• pulling external data in through ODBC and ADO, and the web queries introduced in Excel 97, driven from code through the QueryTable object;
• packaging code as add-ins, and distributing it to colleagues who would never open the editor;
• event handling, user forms and the Windows API calls that filled the gaps VBA left;
• compatibility, the long tax on all of it — code written for one version meeting another, and the file-format break at Excel 2007, when the binary .xls format gave way to the XML-based .xlsx.

Context

In May 2010 Microsoft announced that it was retiring its public newsgroups in favour of web forums — Microsoft Answers for general users, MSDN and TechNet for developers and administrators. The shutdown was phased: it began on 1 June 2010 with the least active groups and worked towards the busiest over the following months. The reasons given were declining newsgroup traffic, better handling of spam, and content that search engines could index and that would persist rather than expire off a server after ninety days.

That is why so many surviving citations point at an address rather than a page. A forum answer written while the group was live could reasonably say “see microsoft.public.excel.programming” and expect the reader to type it into a newsreader; the address is still correct and there is no longer a live server behind it. Links of that kind still turn up across spreadsheet forums and tutorial pages, which is how the name outlives the service that carried it.

The posts themselves were not lost. The run is mirrored in Google Groups, which no longer takes new Usenet posts but keeps the historical content readable, with the coverage gaps usual for archives assembled from feeds; and a great deal of it survives at second hand in the spreadsheet web, quoted into forum answers and tutorial pages by people who no longer say where the code came from. Neighbouring groups on this site include microsoft.public.scripting.vbscript, microsoft.public.word.numbering and microsoft.public.win32.programmer.wmi.