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We are working on backend for life insurance. They have a separate pricing team who creates calculations for different insurance products. The results are usually presented as excel files with heavy scripting inside. Really heavy! Have you seen 100mb excel files? I did!

On the funny note: as powerful excel is, it cannot open two files with the same name from different folders! Or at least my version can't.



I used to work on Excel extensibility. I’ll never forget when we were talking with one of the top 5 insurance companies in the US and they showed us this huge VBA macro and told us they processed the top 10% of their claims using this file. That moment made me realize Excel powers at least 10% of the world economy.


Oh yeah, because references to the book name would conflict. If you open a new instance of Excel (e.g. shift-click the taskbar icon), you can open one file in each, but they can't reference each other.


I have seen 600mb+ geodata based, script bloated, slow as hell, make your MB Air commit sucide type of excel every day for 4 months, working on a project.




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