25 January 2012 by Ross McLean
I was looking forward to this one. Charles has huge respect in the Excel commuitely, and has a list of achievement’s as long as I am tall. Charles is talking about how hes getting on with writing addins in C. This is proper C not that C# rubbish!
Charles first makes the case for why he’s moved over to C, 64 bit and speed beign high on the list. Next its in to VS2010 and Planatech XLL+ with a walk through of how to do it, and some of the gottas for a VBA to C convert. I’ve done a few Pure C XLL’s, using such tools a WXL it works well, but XLL Plus sure looks nice, I like thoses wizards!!!
Synonymous with Speed Charles Williams at the helm
It was an insightful talk, not only for the how, but also for the, – it takes me longer, but is that because I have worked with VBA for 20 years? – I’ll ask if the speed gap has come down next year Charles!
Tags: XL Dev Con 2012
Categories: Addins, C/C++, General, UDF, VBA •
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4 January 2012 by Ross McLean
Yesterday I deployed a Addin to a handful of users.
These days I mainly deploy my .Xla/m using a mixture of Inno Setup and a .net app to automate the Excel OM, and use that to add the addin to the addins list. One way or another I have found this the most robust/easy method.
Today I wanted to issue a “HotFix” for the addin – such is my commitment to continues improvement you understand – but I hit a problem.
My plan was to write (modify) the Inno script so that an updated version of the .Xlam was overwritten into the same Dir with the same file name that the original set up had created.
This worked no problem, but when I opened Excel the Addin was not loaded. Attempting to reload the addin via the addins diolog lead to some sort of error message saying that the file had unreadable content or something… I was at a lost as to what the issue was.
After a while trying different things, I hit across the idea that I had also change some of the data in the File Properties. The most likely looking one to cause an issue was the Revision number. I had changed it form 1, to 2.0
I is long, or I might be Int
I changed it to 2, and tried the process again. Bingo.
So it seems that chaning that number to have any sort of decimal place in it can cuase a problem – there you go, tuck that away in the back of the head for future reference!
Tags: Addin
Categories: Addins, Code •
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28 May 2010 by Ross McLean
Charles Williams is probably best known for his work in Excel calculation speed and VBA performance, not to mention the worlds most famous Excel Addin Name Manager. In truth, he’s a expert in many areas of Excel and on top of all this he’s a great bloke. In this podcast we got down and dirty with Excel performance, uncovering some interesting insights along the way. It was a true pleasure talking with Charles.
Charles the First - King of Speed!
Charles in the founder of Decisions Models, a consulting firm specialising in Excel development, and the farther of the FastExcel addin, we talked about this addin and how it works and also his addin loader tool. This is one for the archives!
Thanks to Charles for making the time and sharing his knowledge with us all.
Podcast: Play in new window
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Categories: Addins, Code, Functions, Podcasts, Spreadsheet Design, UDF •
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12 December 2009 by Ross McLean
Following the recent excitement around Sparklines, it would have been easy to miss a little update to the excellent Sparklines for Excel add in.
Fabrice has updated the way Paretos can be handled, and the result look great, why not take a look for yourself here:
Tags: Sparklines
Categories: Addins, Charting •
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