Part of my job right now is to build some dynamic functionalities into Microsoft Office documents. The only means I've found to do this is through VBA - and thus, the VBA editor which comes built in to Office docs.
The VBA editor is awful. It's missing a million different functionalities that modern development environments need to support. But the worst part is that I'm a hard-core Vim lover, and the VBA editor is barely any better than notepad.
So: Is there any way I can effectively use Vim to do VBA programming? Short of copy-pasting my code into the VBA editor from a different window when I want to try it?
I've never used the VBA editor, but here's something I've done with MS Visual Studio. (MSVS's editor does have some nice features, but I still prefer vim for most editing.)
I open or create the source file in MSVS. I then get the full path to the file (by right-clicking on the tab and selecting "Copy Full Path"), and open the same file in vim in a different window.
I use alt-tab to bounce back and forth between vim and MSVS. When I make a change in vim, I use :w to write the change, then alt-tab back to MSVS. The MSVS editor notices that the file has changed on disk and offers to read the updated version.
Alternatively, if I change the file in MSVS, I write the file (File > Save ...), then alt-tab to vim and use :e! to read the updated file into the vim buffer.
There's no need to copy-paste the code, since both editors are operating on the same disk file. I just have to be very careful not to make changes in both vim and MSVS without writing the file to disk.
It's ugly, and it's not for everyone, but it works for me. Maybe it will work for you.
I use Cygwin, so it's actually a little more complicated; Cygwin programs, including vim, don't recognize Windows-style paths. I can do this:
vi $(cygpath 'WINDOWS_PATH')
where WINDOWS_PATH is pasted from the full path I get from MSVS. The single quotes are necessary to keep the shell from interpreting the \ characters. If you're using a Windows native vim, this step isn't necessary.
That's an interesting opinion. I used VI briefly about fifteen years ago and based on that I contend that the VBA editor is far more suited to its purpose than VI (or VIM?) would be. Is there one particular piece of functionality that it is missing from the VBA editor that precludes you effectively using it for its purpose (editing VBA)? VBA has not been enhanced for many many years, but the fact is it can't be killed off because everyone finds it so easy to use.
If you wish you can write some piece of code in your preferred language that manipulates your word document via COM objects (if it supports that). Then you can call your external piece of code from a simple stub within your Word document. You need to get around some security constraints though in your Word document.
For example I could write some code in VBScript or VBA or Powershell or .Net that manipulates a word doc. I can call that from a small piece of VBA (that might be attached to a button or something in the standard word toolbar)
Related
If someone have to carry on working on an Excel VBA project/module after the previous developer left the company, how do they safely change a global variable name?
These global variable names can be problematic if they are misleading, misspelled, look like another variable, don't follow the chosen convention, etc.
Changing them with a Search/Replace is a problem because sometimes it's a word that appears in comments.
Changing them by Copy/Pasting is a problem because it's long and you can miss some, especially if there are a lot of occurrences or if you change it to something similar.
Is there a way to do this safely via the Excel "IDE", or via another tool?
What you need to do here is called a refactoring - you need to make a possibly dangerous change to the code, without affecting its behavior. Do it wrong and the code breaks!
Renaming an identifier that's used in one or more places, is a rename refactoring.
Most modern IDE's have such a feature (and several other refactorings). However the VBE was at the height of its glory well before Visual Studio was the full-featured tool it has become since then - heck, the VBE was Visual Studio (6.0) in 1998!
So you really have two options:
Do the refactoring manually - the IDE's search & replace functionality (Ctrl+H) can be dangerous here, because it treats code as simple text, without semantic understanding: you need to review every single occurrence individually, or risk renaming an identifier that was not referring to the variable you're trying to rename.
Use a 3rd-party tool - I don't know any VBIDE add-ins that understand the code deeply enough to allow safely refactoring VBA code, other than the open-source Rubberduck project, which I've managed since October 2014). This add-in parses your entire project, builds a symbol table, and lets you navigate and, yes, refactor/rename any identifier, automatically updating all call sites.
Note that Rubberduck is a very active open-source project, constantly improving. Parsing VBA is hard, and getting the VBE functionally on par with modern-day IDEs isn't a small undertaking, nor is it easy... but it's fun, and yep, it works.
So I'm having to run someone else's excel app on my PC, and I'm getting "Can't find Project or Library" on standard functions such as date, format, hex, mid, etc.
Some research indicates that if I prefix these functions with "VBA." as in "VBA.Date" then it'll work fine.
Webpages suggest it has to do with my project references on my system, whereas they must be ok on the developer's system. I'm going to be dealing with this for some time from others, and will be distributing these applications to many others, so I need to understand what's wrong with my excel setup that I need to fix, or what needs to be changed in the xls file so that it'll run on a variety of systems. I'd like to avoid making everyone use "VBA." as an explicit reference, but if there's no ideal solution I suppose that's what we'll have to do.
How do I make "VBA." implicit in my project properties/references/etc?
-Adam
I have seen errors on standard functions if there was a reference to a totally different library missing.
In the VBA editor launch the Compile command from the menu and then check the References dialog to see if there is anything missing and if so try to add these libraries.
In general it seems to be good practice to compile the complete VBA code and then saving the document before distribution.
I had the same problem. This worked for me:
In VB go to Tools » References
Uncheck the library "Crystal Analysis Common Controls 1.0". Or any library.
Just leave these 5 references:
Visual Basic For Applications (This is the library that defines the VBA language.)
Microsoft Excel Object Library (This defines all of the elements of Excel.)
OLE Automation (This specifies the types for linking and embedding documents and for automation of other applications and the "plumbing" of the COM system that Excel uses to communicate with the outside world.)
Microsoft Office (This defines things that are common to all Office programs such as Command Bars and Command Bar controls.)
Microsoft Forms 2.0 This is required if you are using a User Form. This library defines things like the user form and the controls that you can place on a form.
Then Save.
I have experienced this exact problem and found, on the users machine, one of the libraries I depended on was marked as "MISSING" in the references dialog. In that case it was some office font library that was available in my version of Office 2007, but not on the client desktop.
The error you get is a complete red herring (as pointed out by divo).
Fortunately I wasn't using anything from the library, so I was able to remove it from the XLA references entirely. I guess, an extension of divo' suggested best practice would be for testing to check the XLA on all the target Office versions (not a bad idea in any case).
In my case, it was that the function was AMBIGUOUS as it was defined in the VBA library (present in my references), and also in the Microsoft Office Object Library (also present). I removed the Microsoft Office Object Library, and voila! No need to use the VBA. prefix.
In my case, I could not even open "References" in the Visual Basic window. I even tried reinstalling Office 365 and that didn't work. Finally, I tried disabling macros in the "Trust Center" settings. When I restarted Excel, I got the warning message that macros were disabled, and when I clicked on "enable" I no longer got the error message.
Later I re-enabled all macros in the "Trust Center" settings, and the error message didn't show up!
Hey, if nothing else works for you, try the above; it worked for me! :)
Update:
The issue returned, and this is how I "fixed" it the second time:
I opened my workbook in Excel online (Office 365, in the browser, which doesn't support macros anyway), saved it with a new file name (still using .xlsm file extension), and reopened in the desktop software. It worked.
Even when all references are fine the prefix problem causes compile errors.
What about creating a find and replace sub for all 'built-in VBA functions' in all modules,
like this:
replace text in code module
e.g. "= Date" will be replaced with "= VBA.Date".
e.g. " Date(" will be replaced with " VBA.Date(" .
(excluding "dim t As Date" or "mydate")
All vba functions for find and replace are written here :
vba functions list
For those of you who haven't found any of the other answers work for you.
Try this:
Close out of the file, email it to yourself or if you're at work, paste it from the network drive to your desktop, anything to get it to open in "protected mode".
Now open the file
DON'T CLICK ANY ENABLE EDITING OR THE YELLOW RIBBON
Go to the VBA Editor
Go to Debug - - Compile VBA Project, if "Compile VBA Project" is greyed out, then you may need to click the yellow ribbon one time to enable the content, but DO NOT enable macros.
After you click Compile, save, close out of the file. Reopen it, enable everything and it should be OK. This has worked for me 100% of the time.
In my case I was checking work done on my office computer (with Visio installed) at home (no Visio). Even though VBA appeared to be getting hung up on simple default functions, the problem was that I had references to the Visio libraries still active.
I found references to an AVAYA/CMS programme file? Totally random, this was in MS Access, nothing to do with AVAYA. I do have AVAYA on my PC, and others don't, so this explains why it worked on my machine and not others - but not how Access got linked to AVAYA. Anyway - I just unchecked the reference and that seems to have fixed the problem
I've had this error on and off for around two years in a several XLSM files (which is most annoying as when it occurs there is nothing wrong with the file! - I suspect orphaned Excel processes are part of the problem)
The most efficient solution I had found has been to use Python with oletools
https://github.com/decalage2/oletools/wiki/Install and extract the VBA code all the modules and save in a text file.
Then I simply rename the file to zip file (backup just in case!), open up this zip file and delete the xl/vbaProject.bin file. Rename back to XLSX and should be good to go.
Copy in the saved VBA code (which will need cleaning of line breaks, comments and other stuff. Will also need to add in missing libraries.
This has saved me when other methods haven't.
YMMV.
I need some advice on how to go about a particular issue I'm trying to build a work around for, but keep finding myself between a couple of poor options.. The application has a large collection of word doc templates. The application is to on the fly generate one of the templates and fill in the bookmarked values.
I have a few options on how to go about this...
Use the Interop Library: I pretty easily fill in an actual, templated document with the Interop library by going through and grabbing all the bookmarks and filling them in and saving the document again.
Issue: I need to be able to support version of Word from 2003-2010; version becomes a concern here... if I link against the wrong version of the Interop.Word, might it cause compatibility issues for users of older versions? I don't have much to test with here, so I'm not sure...
VBA Macro: I've actually used this method to build excel spreadsheets before; write fields to a csv, read into a new document generated from template via VBA, and ta-da, new document.
Issue: Security settings on end-user PCs are likely to be extremely strict. VBA likely to be disabled.
Is there a better way of going about this that I'm not seeing? Is the Interop version likely to be less of a big deal than I thought? Other than OfficeXML, which is a catastrophe for the documents we're using (I've looked..), is there another good possibility?
Edit: submitted early.. damn browser -_-;
VBA is usually blocked in documents and templates that are opened. But templates in the Word startup directory are allowed. I'm not sure about Word 2007 and 2010, but in Words 97 to 2003 there was a wrdstart directory that could contain templates that were loaded on startup of word. The normal.dot file was in there, and you could add your own to contain scripts, macros toolbars and other stuff.
I think this hasn't changed in essence since then, although I don't do a lot of Word development anymore, so I'm not sure.
[edit]
Yes, it still exists. In Word 2010 you'll find the setting in File -> Options -> Advanced -> File Locations (button). There is a 'Startup' setting, pointing to a directory. Templates in this folder will be loaded on startup and their macro's should be able to be executed.
Check File -> Options -> Trust Center -> Trust Center Settings (button). There, you can specify allowed documents, and trusted location. The wrdstart directory is in there, but you can add your own.
I currently use Programmer's Notepad with the Rebol syntax scheme. It's not bad--does any insightful person have another suggestion?
For my Windows programming work I use the Zeus editor, but I'm not sure if it does Rebol?
Another windows option is TextPad. It is commercial but it is quite a useful editor.
There are 2 Rebol syntax files available from the official site
http://www.textpad.com/add-ons/synn2t.html
I also wrote a TextPad syntax file generator uploaded it to rebol.org
http://www.rebol.org/view-script.r?script=textpad-syngen.r
It is probably quite easy to modify this script to support other editors.
vim.
Especially with the following binding in your _vimrc/.vimrc:
nnoremap <Leader>fr :w<CR>:silent ! %<CR>
In normal mode, Leaderfr saves your current file and executes it: (fr is a memo for 'fast-run')
:wEnter save current file
:silent execute without messages: ! open shell % paste current file name Enter
Leader is usually \ key, I have this mapped to spacebar. In case anyone is interested on how to do that, post a comment.
Programmer’s Notepad better than Crimson Editor with Code Folding and Great Project Management
http://www.pnotepad.org/
It's opensource so you can even modify it in C++
For Windows, there is Crimson Editor or E with the REBOL bundle.
For Mac, there is TextMate.
Emacs, I believe has a REBOL syntax too.
Sublime Text is a really nice Windows editor (commercial, but reasonably priced) that supports TextMate configurations (well, at least for syntax and snippets) so if you manage to get a REBOL bundle from somewhere, you can use it with this.
SciTE also has REBOL syntax coloring support because the Scintilla editor component it's based on includes this.
Notepad++ should also support REBOL syntax coloring, being Scintilla based, but as it is currently distributed, the support is not compiled in. If you're so inclined, you could probably compile it yourself and add the support back in. It might be worth it because Notepad++ is quite a good editor too.
I can't include proper links because I don't have enough rep, but this should do:
www.sublimetext.com
www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
www.scintilla.org/index.html
notepad-plus-plus.org
http://rebol.wik.is/index.php?title=Notepad%2b%2b
which is a REBOL plugin for Notepad++
I use JEdit which not only has REBOL syntax highlighting but also auto-indenting. It has most of the features you'd expect from a text editor (e.g. block selection, configurable keyboard shortcuts).
There are versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux so if you choose to work cross-platform you won't need to learn a new editor. The web page is Jedit.org1
I use UltraEdit.
with its advanced project, syntax highlighting, macro, command-line control and total keyboard shortcut configuration, per language and project, you can program the editor to do just about all of what you need at a single click of the mouse, or keyboard.
my setup starts rebol on any file, and assigns a launch "default project script " to a shortcut, so wherever I am in the files, I still launch the project's relevant script. change project, it will run that new project's scripts. another key for unit tests, another key for "find in all opened files, etc, etc..
also, the actual text-exiting, when combined with a few macros which create functions, objects, and more using the clipboard and "currently highlighted" text makes it much faster than any Visual IDE including MSVC.
ultra edit itself has thousands of other advanced features, and they all work... really they do.
I've tried other editors and they always fall short when I start to push them.
yeah, you have to buy it... but its cheap (like one or two hours of your life salary ;-)
so considering you might use it for several months or years... its a cheap investment.
also, ultra edit is now released on linux and the mac port is just around the corner.
I use EditPlus for several years, it is not free but not expensive. It has Rebol syntax highlighting file (downloadable from its web site).
It is especially useful & very fast if you work with huge files (over 100 mb) or with lots of files (say 300 files.), find & replace takes a second.
For syntax highlighting and a simple autocomplete, you can use http://komodoide.com/komodo-edit/.
It's free and open source with several nice features, including folder browsing while editing, which I personally find very useful.
There is also a bunch of other languages supported in case you want to take a closer look and give this editor a chance.
We have a project, and the professor asked us to print the program codes using microsoft word. however when i pasted all my codes in ms word it turns out that it doesn't have coloring, those nice programming fonts.. It just looks awfully ugly in microsoft word..
I want this to be printed on papers very gorgeously. Like what we see in our notepad++
If you are on Windows, you can open the source code in Visual Studio (assuming it is C++, C# or VB), copy the code, and paste it to Word.
"Visual Studio" to "Word" does keep the formatting (color and fonts).
I do not use Word for this when I can avoid it. It's simply not very good at keeping the formatting and doesn't provide really good-looking prints.
The line-breaking isn't program-aware.
The paragraph breaking isn't program aware.
The keeping of the formatting from VS doesn't do structure-based markup, does it?
The typesetting engine of Word is a lot worse than TeX or Quark/Indesign
Microsoft Word is very handy for code reviews. Particularly if you don't want to splurge for one of the tools explicitly designed for peer code reviews. Each reviewer can insert their comments and/or modify the code themselves right in the document. If you keep track changes on then you can see what was changed and accept or reject the changes. During the review you only have to cycle through the comments and changes. When you are all done, you can simply copy and paste the final product back into the source file. It beats having to take a list of comments, decipher them and then incorporate the requests yourself.
EDIT: We use Visual Studio. So Cut/Paste between the source and Microsoft Word works fine, except in the cases where the line length exceeds the page size.
If you have the NppExport Plugin, go to
Plugins -> NppExport -> (Then you can choose between "Export to RTF", "Copy RTF to Clipboard", or "Copy all formats to clipboard")
Then open it in Microsoft Word if you choose export to rtf, or paste it to Word if you choose copy to clipboard
Hope this helps
I tried it for my SQL assignment and it works
I'm not sure I understand the question, but if you're asking "how do I put my source code into Word and make it look pretty like Notepad++," you'll want to do some research into automating Microsoft Word.
Word automation using C#
OLE Automation using Word (Article)
Microsoft Word Automation Class
This may seem obvious, but how about you just print it from notepad++?
Eclipse does the same thing told by decasteljau.
When you copy code from eclipse, and then you paste on Outlook, the code keeps its colours.