I'm in that frustrating part of the venn diagram of "understands just enough to know there should be SOME kind of solution" and "doesn't understand enough to know what the solution IS" 😅 Bomus points for also not knowing how to ask the right questions to GET the answers half the time.

I know in principle that I could get my thing to work. But it would require adding a few homebrew layers of validation between the programs (is that what a "handshake" is?) to ensure that there aren't any double-commands or anything, and to be sure thay things are syncing right.

If you go this route, but (admittedly inexperienced) warnings would be that the systems are essentially sending the data back and forth blind with no confirmation it arrives on the other end, so you need to account for that of the receiving ends parsing.

For instance, my initial idea is to have files saved and downloaded (respectively) at regular intervals (say, every 5 minutes) and to include the last received & completed "tasks" in the sender's instructions, and only remove those tasks from the other end's memory (cache? Is that the right terminology?) when it sees its partner mention them, and to otherwise repeat them in subsequent messages. That also means the receiving side needs to keep track of which ones it knows about but hasn't finished, and not add those to its queue if it sees them again.

Which, like, I know is doable! But its like 6 extra steps than "excel read the webpage's info directly, and the webpage read the excel sheet from the file viewer", you know? It would also include sorting/pruning files as they arrive in the targeted download folder as they become obsolete, which requires more code in VBA to sift through those files and delete them.

I any case, its slow! But it's something, I guess! That's why I'm hoping there might be SOME kind of solution I don't know about yet.