Paul Barnhurst is building a developer tool that treats Excel workbooks like a proper tech stack, replacing VBA with modern code. It lets you refactor formulas fast, insert M code, and get linting-style feedback without touching VBA, which he says is effectively deprecated.
I am building a tool much like VS Code in Cursor, if any of you have used Cursor for Excel. So it's not just like taking AI and putting it on the front end of Excel, but rather create a power coder type tool that sits on the back end and lets you treat your Excel files as a finance tech stack. Which means that you could go and refact, is what we would say, encoding, rename things in those files very quickly. And we would do this not with VBA, because VBA was basically deprecated in 1999 based off of Visual Basic 6.0, which nobody uses anymore unless they have to. I mean, it's cobol effectively. It's going to let you go through and make changes to those Excel files very quickly, do things like inserting M code directly into those Excel files as well. It's going to have a front end environment that is basically stripped of all the formatting things you don't need and allow you to input formulas in ways that won't let you do right now. So in any modern coding environment, there's something called linting, which is like you type in the code and then it squiggles if you put something in wrong. All right? This does not happen in Excel. In Excel, if you have a malformed formula, it's just going to say, hey, check your parentheses right?
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