Dude

1: Ambition

The original post with thousands of notes on it <3

It pre-dates MS Office 2007 and a lot of stuff in it was programmed with macros because the functions to do the stuff required didn't exist at the time.

So anyway. Part of the reason I was even hired was to maintain the file as it slowly degraded and more and more of those macros simply didn't work anymore.

For some macros I've replaced them with now-existing functions but in other cases I found out that the file would grow exponentially in size if I implemented a complex function in 3k lines across 50 columns so it was easier to just fix broken macros.

One of the funniest ways whole sections of this massive file could break was image files.

For example - there are multiple sheets that compile budget data for printing. Those were and are refreshed with macros. As I discovered after many hours of searching the archive files those sheets used to have a jpg in them with blank signature spaces. The macro would place that jpg under the data so that it'd appear on the print.

HOWEVER. At some point people started copying the compiled data into another file where they could edit it for printing. At that stage the jpg became obsolete and someone deleted it.

This broke multiple macros across all those sheets.

So. Instead of fixing multiple lines of code and searching all the references to the file I've did the only reasonable thing:

I've added a new jpg which is a tiny white square counting a few pixels across and named it the same as the original jpg. It remains unseen by the rest of the staff but it magically fixed multiple issues with the file.

And yes. Over the years my coworkers managed to accidentally delete that jpg as well. Several times. I remembered it because the last time this happened was this Monday.