XLTB develop flow

Old forum General discussion
1

Hi!

This is my second post here! Thanks again for your toolbox, it is very very useful!

If I may ask, my question is rather a curiosity about how you are developing XLTB…
Since I’ve been using excel for a while I’ve been wondering for so long about writing a DIY addin to add functionalities to my workbooks, but I ended up writing something in VB.NET with visual studio (Add-in template), which, however, is different, for example, for excel 2010 and 2013…

Your solution with an .exe file, however, is far more elegant. I love that it doesn’t differentiates between 2010 or 2013 excel’s versions, and also that it installs successfully for users that doesn’t have admin permissions (no need to type any admin password). This means the highest portability ever. Really a wonderful feature…

To this regard, I was therefore asking whether you could spoil few hints about your develop workflow (if possible of course XD):
-where do you write and test your code?
-how do you pack the exe file?
-what does actually the exe file do?

Thanks!

Dario.

2

Hi Dario,

it’s no secret at all.

The Toolbox is developed using Excel’s built-in Visual Basic IDE. I maintain two separate addin files, one for Excel 2000-2003 (.XLA) and one for Excel 2007-2013 (.xlam). The main development environment has been Excel 2010 on Windows XP so far. To copy code modules from the .XLAM file to the .XLA file, I use a home-grown set of tools (http://vbatools.sf.net).

The installer file (.EXE) is compiled using http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php. The code that registers the add-in in Excel is open; read more about it on the http://xltoolbox.sourceforge.net/blog/2013/12/using-innosetup-to-install-excel-addins or download it directly at https://github.com/bovender/ExcelAddinInstaller.

I am currently in the process of re-writing the entire add-in in C# using Visual Studio Professional. Since I can only work on the Toolbox in what little spare time I have, I can not tell when a first public release will be ready.

Hope this helps!

Daniel

3

Thank you so much!

I’m sorry I missed to check your blog articles before posting!

Thanks again!

Dario.

4

I plot and create a straight line labeled in Excel, and want to annotate them with a set of numbers, it is the number of samples.
I think the same value as 4 X and Y values, and the annotations are some examples.
However, when I have this function, only one of them was arrested a few examples 1-12.
Three data sets are marked with the sample number 12.
Is it possible for all the people I plan to use some examples 1-12?
Thank you.