I have been a longtime programmer in VBA due to my job needs for manipulating data in Excel. I am in the process of moving most of my computing activities to Linux; specifically Ubuntu.
I am new to Perl, and to PerlMonks; so when I was browsing the monastery the other day, I saw a post about using Perl to control Excel. The concept hit me like a ton of bricks; the idea that I could use a language that has extensive applications beyond Excel to program Excel was an aha! moment.
No more using a Microsoft lock in language for me. Going forward I am going to do all of my spreadsheet programming in Perl. The bonus to me is that the Perl knowledge will be useful in other computing areas that I am interested in, unlike VBA.