OpenOffice.org and Excel VBA Macros

[Note to All Readers: I no longer work at Novell, so I have stopped taking submissions for Excel VBA macros to test. Thanks to all those who provided the OOo team with macros to try. --Ted (05May08)]

[Mac Users concerned about VBA Macros: Help us keep improving VBA macro support in Calc. See below about sending us your macro-laden XLS files. Thanks, Ted (10Aug06)]

You have to love a guy like Michael Meeks. Widely renowned for his bare-bones blog style, Michael is also the foremost contributor to OpenOffice.org outside of the maintainers at Sun .

One of Michael’s latest areas of endeavor is getting Microsoft Excel VBA macros to execute in OpenOffice Calc.

This screenshot shows a fairly geeky example of a hypocycloid generator. The generator uses a VBA macro, shown lower left, to generate source values from the positions of three interactive sliders on the left near where it says “Parameters.” The data is dumped into the table at the far right. Another macro chews up the data and spits out the hypocycloid graphic. Still more macros allow you to click through some pre-set values, generate random values, and so on.

The point, however, is not what the example macros shown here do. The point is that they are Excel macros correctly doing work in Calc.

Want to contribute? When I talked with Michael at GUADEC, he said that he doesn’t have enough real world Excel macros to test against.

So if you have a good example, send it my way and I’ll send it to Michael in his secret OpenOffice.org laboratory.

I’m thaeger at that novell dot com place.

[21AUG06: Update Posted.]

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