Came across this...

Been on holiday this week - so limited news - though am assuming 'others' have progressed things - will find out on Monday!

However, in a trawl of Google I came across this article which looked interesting;

From, Heat Transfer Today –R.J. Ribando - web ref

http://faculty.virginia.edu/ribando/modules/xls/VBAPrimer.pdf

with quotes as follows:

" In the past, even mildly complicated engineering calculations have not mixed well with 
spreadsheets because of the very strong tendency to wind up with nearly-impossible-to-debug 
"spaghetti code". .......... However, by using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in conjunction with the Excel spreadsheet, the user has the convenience of a spreadsheet for neatly-formatted input/output  and for graphical display of results, i.e., to function as a graphical user interface (GUI).  Meanwhile well-structured, readable, line-oriented code can be used for the more complicated calculations...........


Conclusion

Student response to use of VBA within other courses, both undergraduate and graduate, 
has been excellent.   Since all have had a structured programming course earlier (some in Fortran 
90, some in C++, others in Java), the migration to VBA is very straightforward.   Most welcome 
the opportunity to add another package to their inventory of proficiencies.  Several graduate students in a recent programming-intensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) elected to do all 
assignments using Excel/VBA."

so there may be hope yet!

Except there is also a disclaimer;

" I am not a computer scientist or programmer, but rather an engineer.   That being the 
case, I have found VBA to be a quick and easy way to do most of the things I want to do in my 
teaching and research.  Code that you will find described here or available on the website is not 
guaranteed to be error free or even to follow good programming practice."

or - beware even expert engineers can muck up using this environment!

The journey continues .... ;)