I made $150 Doing What I don’t Know How To Do

The Story:

I build WordPress calculators, from the very popular ones to custom calculators, and I have a few repeat customers. (I’ve been doing this for more than 5 years)

So I noticed most of my custom gigs are usually designed in Excel, which gave me an Idea.

I created a gig for converting Excel spreadsheets to WP Calculators, and that worked interestingly.

One of my long-time clients is Mr Fred (not the real name). I have built many calculators for Mr Fred from his company’s spreadsheets.

Just a few days ago, I completed one of those calculators, and the next day, Mr Fred asked:

“Hi Michael, can you help with building an Excel Dashboard?” (sent with an attachment)

And my response:

“Yes, I can.”

In reality, I have no Idea how to make it.

In addition to my ignorance, this came with a deadline of 3 days.

So I fired up my Windsurf IDE. Copied the whole requirement, pasted it in, but I encountered a lot of errors in the output.

First, the dashboard.xlsm created by the tool couldn’t open with my Excel software, so I’ll have to follow a manual process.

The requirements of the project.

An Excel Dashboard that could read data from multiple (infinite) other spreadsheets that have multiple tabs in them and display them, of course, without opening those files.

The Dashboard should also have the ability to write back data into any of the source spreadsheets.

The Challenges I Encountered

1. Excel can’t open .xlsm file from Windsurf

Windsurf was able to generate a Dashboard.xlsm file for me with the requirement I prompted it with, but the file couldn’t be opened on my Excel App. I uninstalled my current version, tried different PCs it couldn’t just open.

Solution

For some reason, maybe security-related related I had to create my XLSM file manually – that was the only version that Excel could open. I don’t know if this was peculiar to me.

2. Windsurf doesn’t do well with multiple tasks in a single prompt

I observed that the VBA codes I was getting, even after building out the dashboard manually, weren’t effective.

Solution

Breaking down the tasks into tiny bits and carrying them out one after the other yielded a perfect result. I was still able to achieve everything I wanted, but one task at a time.

What I Learned

1. Just like every other AI vibecoding tool like Cursor, Bolt, etc, Windsurf allows you to work with multiple models from Open AI, Anthropic, Grok, Gemini, and Deepseek. I found out that o4 mini high produced the best result in understanding my Excel task. Especially writing VBA code for the dashboard.

Sonnet 3.7 has been amazing for my data analysis tasks, including NLP classifications. But in this case, o4 mini high gave a better response as regards to writing the code for each function I needed.

2. While using sonnet 3.7, it suggested I use a Form control (which I was using for the first time), but o4 eventually made me used Active X buttons, and that worked better.

3. O4 mini high was more friendly to me as a first timer, not leaving out any step to the assumption that I knew what to do.

4. Instead of sending the full requirement to Windsurf, I should just break it down into pieces and use the AI tool to achieve them one after the other. If I followed this, I would have been done in 2 hours.

Bottom Line

For the first time, I got to know what Macros, VBA, and Active X are while prompting.

I was able to create the dashboard after hours of prompting.

Now that I am over it, I realized it could have even been faster

We are living in times where we can do virtually anything that an AI tool can understand. So the limits are off

In the end, Mr Fred paid me $150 for a task I was doing for the first time with my $10 Subscription on Windsurf (I am an early adopter of Windsurf, so I pay 10 instead of 15).

Mr Fred could have as well done this himself with some prompts and saved $140, but anyways – I know I can and that’s why I get paid for it.

I also took the time to do the prompting, right?

What you know is what sets you apart.