Hello, I am a new Perl user (and generally an inexperienced programmer). For my work, we use very poorly-coded excel macros daily to execute tasks such as comparing the contents of two excel documents, making sure that excel documents contain certain information, and checking that files with specific file names reside in the correct Windows directories. Some of these macros can take up to 15 minutes to run. It seems like these tasks should be computationally simple, and it's my instinct that it takes so long due to the fact that it's coded in Visual Basic. These macros were not coded by professional programmers, but by engineers who were only mildly experienced with VB. Would it be likely that if these macros, doing the same tasks, would be faster to run if coded in Perl? I'm interested in taking on a project that would be useful and is within my scope as a beginning Perl programmer.

In reply to New to Perl - is it a better language than VB for this application? by DyslexicHobo

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.