A day and a half behind schedule, here’s a long (10mins!) video of how to write and “deploy” as VSTO addin for Excel 2007. It was, to be honest, a nightmare to do, as my PC is about 100 years old! I promise that as soon as the funds allow I will get a new one – at least now I have a legitimate reason for the spend!
The sound and the image get out of sync about half way through, for which I apologise, but I’ve already spent enough time on it, and people should be able to keep up, there’s nothing to difficult about it. Editing in Widows Movie Maker is rubbish!
You can customise the shape of your user forms, and it’s Kewl! All the kids in my house are doing it! Look at this stupid form shape I was able to make!
Why on earth would you want to do it I hear you ask?! That’s a very good question! When I started this I thought it was really not very useful at all. I’m still thinking that, but maybe there might be a few practical uses for it. I’m thinking tool tips and popup type things. I have covered using captionless user forms (and worksheets!), and even popup forms previously. I was never happy with the way the captionless forms looked in VBA, they look ok in VB6 but in VBA they has a wafty boarder.
Of course if you want to move over to VSTO you can even make a user form in the shape of John Walkenbach’s upper half! Is that the sound of ringing tills I can hear!
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!
I’ve been reading micro mart for years, its focus is hardware and OS stuff, but it also has other interesting bits and bobs, it’s a good bathroom read all round!
There were a couple of things in this week’s issue that stood out and I’d thought I’d share them here.
The first is independent OS’s. I’ve only just started to use Linux in anger, so the fact that there are even more OS’s out there throw me a bit. To be clear, what we are talking about here are OS that are not derived from OSX, Windows, Linux or Unix, they are built from the ground up. Having said that, it’s not quite true! For example, Syllable is based around Amgia OS, and Haiku is based on BeOS. But they are only based on these; the kernels are either rewritten from scratch, or extensions of the base functionality. As you might expect these are not all signing all dancing OS’s yet, but its surprising how stable some of them are for Alpha releases.
The one that stands out most is ReactOS. It’s basically a copy of Windows XP. Is is based around the wine API code, and aims to run all software that currently runs on windows XP thus solving one of the main problems with none windows base OS’s no game and limit software!
Don’t expect too much from React, it has a handful of developers and is an open source project at alpha level. I installed it on Virtual box OSE running in Ubuntu 8, from a mounted ISO on a HDD. I’m not fibbing here, it installed in about 30 seconds ok it only had to format a 6gb virtual HDD, but still that’s bloody quick!!! What’s it like to use? Well it’s a bit unstable and is not pretty, but its somehow still impressive. If you have a VM, why not take a look, and watch this space!
I have rambled on a bit here so I will start a new post for the next thing!
P.S. please no comments saying why not just uses Linux and run Wine if you need to ask that you need to think harder!
JP asked if I could expand on the Cancel post. I thought that I had already posted a DoEvent example, but I couldn’t find it on this blog, although when I dug out the org. file it did have a link to a blog post that didn’t work!!!! Maybe my blog is losing content!
