The Developer Tab

I vaguely remember the first time I learned that Microsoft Excel has a Developer tab. It's not visible in the standard installation; you have to go into settings to enable it. I found it while researching how to create a macro. That's only one small piece of what you can do in the Developer tab, including Visual Basic coding.

Copilot knows enough about the functionality, but it can't do anything for you in this area. It's a bit cumbersome going back and forth, but I managed to solve some issues with the new tool I'm building for my client. In particular, I'm learning how to configure the Excel spreadsheet to allow for user input. I have drop-down menus and checkboxes that indicate data to pass to the query to filter the results. 

The challenging part is the interplay between Excel, Power Query, SQL Server, and Visual Basic. In some cases, I don't know why something works, but as long as it works, it's good enough for government work. 

I'm off for the next four days, but part of me actually wants to keep working on this project. It's nice to have a project I enjoy to pass the time that would otherwise be spent on boring tasks.