Excel is my Swiss army knife. I started using Lotus 123 in the late 1980s to automate data input via the serial port from scales, pH meters and such in a PCB shop. Also used it for editing Gerber drill and router files. Later, I used Excel with VBA and Sysinternals utilities to manage desktops and VMs. I still use Excel weekly with a barcode scanner to track household stuff.
In my case it was real-time interactive data acquisition from a scientific instrument computer to the PC, into one spreadsheet as a database with live charting, followed by tabular calculation and a client requirements filter before final reportable data was selected and placed on a deliverable Word document.
All automatically to mimic the established 1000-step manual process that produces the same paperwork product.
Which was either emailed or sent to the clients from the old built-in faxmodems we all used to have. Once this was fully established, I had the "paperless" office.
The hard part was the object-oriented VBA in Excel to interface with the antique host's 1979 BASIC through the COM port, and write & read the files to disk (which the antique never had).
One cool thing since it was a COM port (when land lines were everywhere), instead of plugging the antique host into a PC in the lab for Windows data handling, you could alternatively plug the host into an external telephone modem which was set to answer mode.
Then from a remote PC, use that modem to dial in to your instrument and operate from there. Long-distance charges may apply.
Early laptops all had COM ports and good ones also had infrared for communication with business cellphones. You installed the infrared driver and it was a virtual COM port to Windows. You could really call in to the lab from anywhere, no more dependence on a land line. This was before USB or Bluetooth.
Over the years as serial mice had been replaced by PS/2 mice, and external modems replaced by convenient built-in internal ones (since there were so many people on dial-up), laptops no longer had physical COM ports, just telephone jacks. USB and Bluetooth were used as virtual COM ports for cellular sessions but then back in the lab with the same laptop you had to use its built-in modem and a plain telephone cord. You had to connect to the host's external modem by disconnecting it from the phone line, and plugging in your PC to the host modem instead of directly to the host COM port now. Then use modem commands intended for leased-line operation without a dial tone.
Without relying on the continued operation of the antique hosts, it could also open and write files in a common format used by instrument makers to this day.
