In this podcast we caught up with Excel DNA author Govert van Drimmelen. Govert is a Mathematics lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, in South Africa. Excel DNA has had some attention from the Excel blog sphere in the past few months, Simon, Mike, and Mathias have all posted about it. I’ve been using it for a while now, and it’s brilliant. Here we talked about how Excel DNA came about, the basics of how it works, some of the new features and what’s planned for the further.
Govert van Drimmelen, famous for his Tom Selleck impression
If you don’t know what Excel DNA is, well then listen to the podcast, but in short it’s a free and easy way to get .Net code into Excel.
I’m sure you will all join with me in thanking Govert, not only for making time for the podcast, but also for all the hard work he’s done in getting Excel DNA out of the door – well done Govert!!!
And remember if you’d like to see more of Excel DNA, I’m giving a talk about it at the UK Excel Dev Con, in a weeks time!!!
I was asked to report on the time I was spending on different tasks each day. As quick as a flash, I was reminded of Dick’s Excel tool for doing this.
Not too shabby for sure, but these days I’m not always in Excel, and although I could extend Dick’s code, it doesn’t do everything out of the box. So I took a look around, I didn’t look very far to be fair, but I quickly found Rachota. It’s a light weight Java app, its not too bad, but I found it slightly awkward to use. For example to change the tasks you have to jump around the dialog a bit. The dialogs a little ugly, and there’s not much in the way of reporting. Overall a step up from Dicks addin, but still not something I could use meaningfully.
My next, and I’m happy to say final, stop was the mighty; Grindstone. Firstly a bonus point for the name. It’s a .Net app (looking at the grid control 2+). Itlooks nice and is well layout -not perfect mind. I would have liked to see the bottom controls at the top or in the middle of the dialog – better still, if I could place them where I wanted, but no big deal.
At least you can work down the dialog logically. Reporting is available out of the app, it will fill out a grid control which, inexplicably, you can’t copy out of, but you can export to XML. It also has the ability to calculate invoices, based on a rate table, but I have not used this myself.
Here is the BETA version of my Colour Manager, and tool for creating colour pallets in Excel:
It’s a VB6 com addin, the only thing you really need to know is that you load a picture on the left and then click that picture to get the colour at that point. You can then click a pallet square to place it where that square is. Click the send to workbook button to send it to the active workbook.
However I have also made a video to show how to use it. Bosh!
XL Dennis has made public the first version of his code librarian – “.NET Co Library”.
I’ve done a bit of testing for this addin and can personally vouch for how useful it is – keep all you VBA code in one place – copy the .mdb and take it with you, bung the .mdb on a network drive and you can share your code with the world (well the folks with access to the network any road)
Here’s what Dennis has to say:
.NET Co Library is a managed COM add-in for Microsoft Excel. The acronym Co in its name refers to both Connection and Code.
With the tool you can:
Store created VBA code, code snippets / procedures / modules, and SQL Queries in a well organized way enabling you to reuse the code in all kind of Excel VBA solutions.
Create connection strings to a various number of databases with two wizards, the .NET Wizard and the Data Link Wizard. Store the created connection strings in a structural way enabling you to reuse the connection strings in all kind of Excel VBA solutions.
.NET Co Library has been designed so it can be shared by a group of VBA developers over a network.
Thats right, it’s the future, it’s .Net!!!
The addin, makes it easy to save code snippets, (even whole modules) and search back through them in other projects – it’s a much better way to work with code than just copying it out of other workbooks…
But it’s not just VBA code, it’s SQL, and connection strings too…
What more could a Excel programmer ask for? Go on give it a try! And did i mention it was free…
I’ve had this done for a while but was hoping to get a bit of testing done on it – thats not gone so well, but I want to get it out there. This then is “Beta” which in this case means don’t even think about blaming me for anything! Having said that I don’t believe it should cause an major issues – I’ve only found one issue that i have not addressed yet as it occurs in very odd situations.
The download .zip has a install .exe in it. Run that and it will give you a standard installation experience.
Apart form the UI the bulk of the code is from Charles Williams of DecisionModels.com. Also look at his fab article here
Once installed I’ve stuck a button on the Menu bar (sorry, you can change the code if you like, the pw for the VBA project is “methodsinexcel”)
The main screen is where all the action takes place. I hope it’s fairly straight forward, if not post any questions in the comments:
Clicking the About link explains what each part actually does, it also shows the uninstall button.
