You missed the part where the users preferred the OP's apps.
An IT department exists to satisfy the company's needs, not vice versa. If you can't do the job with the 'resources' given to you, resignation is always an option. But don't fail to do your job and then whine about 'resources'.
That's the first use of a macro I can wrap my head around, but it can also be done elegantly without macros - each function that acts on a row or column of data will have a "list of values" argument that could either be a list of column values from a row or a list or row values from a column.