Programming Excel Visual Basic Stand alone

**Billyboy** · 08-15-2009, 02:31 AM

Not sure if anyone can help with this. But thanks to the help of many of you on this forum I have created a pretty neat excel program, that saves me about a 1/2 hours worth of work each time I use.

I was thinking about selling this other people in my field, but didnt want to just give them an excel work book.

So I began thinking about writing the program in Visual Basic. I happen to have a copy of Visual Basic 5 enterprise edition, I know its quite outdated but I already own it and am somewhat familiar with it albeit on a very low level.

Is there a way to just incorporate my excel work book into VB so I dont have to re write everything and just kind of use VB as a nice shell to give the work book a stand alone look and feel.

Or is there another way to turn my work book into a stand alone program?

Anyone have any ideas

Thanks All

**dominicb** · 08-15-2009, 08:42 AM

Good morning Billyboy

There is a free application here that purports to turn your Excel workbook into an .exe file. Don't know how good it is as I've never used it, buit it's free so you've lost nothing.

That aside, Excel isn't a secure development platform so anything that you put in to try and protect your work can be circumvented - if you choose to develop in Excel, then that's something you have to get used to.

No you can't incorporate your work straight into VB - you are going to have to recode a lot of it and write whole new bits to handle things that are done for you automaticaly in Excel - file formats and the like. Just out of interest, your VB5 is now well out of date and has been superceded by newer versions, and is now known as Visual Basic. You might consider ditching VB5 and downloading Visual Basic Express Edition 2008 for free from here.

HTH

DominicB