SidesWays Blog

I'd previously explored how to move Excel VBA prototypes into a production environment and did not find a satisfying path with Microsoft technologies. An idea for an approach that I may try as a proof of concept: 1. The Excel VBA Macro would need to be created with a specific set of coding rules and form controls. This is not intended to be a general purpose macro converter and is just being designed for some of the practices I have used over the years. It might serve as a basis for a broader converter down the road. There is still a lot of code written in Excel VBA and it's not a market that is attracting a lot of developer tool competition. It's worth looking into building a set of libraries in VBA similar to how the Google Apps Script (GAS) functions are organized for possible leverage there some day, but the intent is not to put one prototype product into another prototype so GAS is not the target of the code generation in step 3 below. A useful site related t...

I was thinking of a quick-and-dirty solution for moving VBA to a server, but found it was essentially shot down by Microsoft a long while ago: Considerations for server-side Automation of Office https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/257757 I have some other ideas of using an Excel VBA metaphor (in essence a stack of sheets) within a Node.js module, perhaps implementing a set of functions similar to Google Apps Script (GAS) to reduce the learning curve. A simple a way to move Excel VBA (which is very productive in a corporate Excel environment) to a web front-end for low volume self-serve production use is needed. Any idea has dozens if not more people around the world thinking about it - maybe someone has already solved this problem and I can just use it? There are postings on Stack Overflow to figure this out, but consolidated here for quick review. Here's an example of calling an Excel VBA Sub and Function from PowerShell.  PowerShell code: 1: $objExcel = new-...