Office Zealot

Back in the day, PS (Pre-SharePoint), I was quite the kick-butt VBA developer.  I built many a system, some still going, using Excel/Word/Access/PowerPoint.  Because of this, I watched with great interest the countdown to go-live for the new OfficePalooza.  If you haven't seen it, take a look.  They are running a contest over ...

As a software developer working in a particular software one tends to think only of solutions within that technology – within that box.  Makes sense to me. But today I found that thinking outside the box is sometimes necessary to solve technology problems in ways that are almost impossible to imagine when your gaze is focused too tightly on ...

There is an interesting post in the VSTO forum about VBA/VSTO/VSTA. The question is: ''Is VSTO/VSTA intended to replace VBA?'' http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1461382&SiteID=1 The future of VBA and VSTO/VSTA's role continues to be a hot topic. Excluding VSTA for a moment, VBA and VSTO are two different tools. Though ...

There really isn't a lot of advice out there on how to approach migrating to VSTO. I came to VSTO from the perspective of a long time Office VBA developer. For me, the things I spent the most time on were developing an understanding of .NET/COM interoperability and the draconian VSTO security and deployment model. If you're coming from ...

Recently a friend of mine asked me for help with a data management issue. Same story, different day - he had numerous Excel files (about 8-10 he tells me) with sales prospects that he needed to combine and clean. This friend is former professional water skier and national champion with a warm and sunny Florida residence on a private ...

How do I retrieve the login name of the current user in Excel or VBA? This has to be one of the most common questions asked by people building Office-based applications. Though Charles covered it pretty throughly a couple of years ago, I thought I'd give it some more coverage. Seems as though many people still go the API route when the VBA Environ ...

There are a lot of authors (some with books in the works) that maintain blogs that grace the pages of OfficeZealot.com including Chris Webb (book in the works), Mauro Cardarelli (book in the works), Ed Bott, Eric Carter, Andrew Whitechapel and yes, yours truly. There is even an editor – Melanie Spiller who can attest to the following: a lot ...

In Part I, I discussed how to set the worksheet up, now it’s time to look at some code. Building a report consists of three logical operations: determining the correct MDX that will yield the desired results, fetching the data, and displaying the data. In this post I’ll focus on the first task – determining the correct MDX. ...

The main objectives in this post are to show some screenshots that demonstrate what you can expect when you complete the exercise and to do all of the preliminary setup on the workbook. The goal of this example is to show how you can create reports in Excel that consume Analysis Services data and provide basic drill up/drill down functionality. ...