I’m late to this, but since you asked…

I do my personal budgets in Excel. There are repetitive tasks that could easily be automated. Mostly just duplicating the worksheet and clearing previous entries. Also, I don’t always remember to add the 45¢ surcharge for paying my water bill with an electronic check.

So I spent a whole weekend learning some surface level VBA and wrote a macro. It asks for a confirmation in case I accidentally fat finger my hot key. It duplicates the active worksheet. It wipes all of my previous budget entries. It asks about when I’m getting paid so it knows what order to put it in the workbook. It asks if there’s an upcoming water bill and, if I answer yes, asks how much, then tacks 45¢ onto that. It asks how much money was in the bank prior to being paid, then how much my wife and I got paid. It asks how much money I plan to spend on gas and groceries. It analyzes how much I have set aside for the mortgage. If there’s nothing and it’s after the 15th of the month, it does the whole thing. If there’s nothing and it’s before the 16th of the month, it sets aside half. If there’s anything there at all, it sets aside the remainder, regardless of today’s date. If the full amount is there, it does nothing. It looks at a section I have set aside for my savings account, totals it, writes the balance forward, and clears the previous entries. It reminds me to set aside money for my credit card payments.

Among other things. It took probably took 30 hours to figure it out and write it. But now, given that I use Excel a lot at work, it’s something I can take to the office.

Since getting my toes wet with VBA, I’ve also taken to some very basic bash scripting for things I want to automate on my computers.