Proposed Incubator project for VBA interop
Yesterday I sent off a proposal for a new incubator project for review to Louis Suarez-Potts,
Project Title ============= VBA Interop Mission Statement ================= Promote adoption of OpenOffice by providing support for users who wish to execute VBA ( Initially Excel ) macros in OpenOffice. Build a community of developers to maintain & improve VBA interoperability Rationale ========= One of the biggest barriers to OpenOffice adoption is lack of macro interoperability. In the enterprise space generally the most mission critical macros exist in Excel spreadsheets. Toeliminate or lower this barrier clearly will ease adoption of OpenOffice. Some initial and promising work has been started in go-oo.org ( http://go-oo.org ), we wish to make this work more freely available. Project Goals =============== * Setup an Incubator project. * Build on the initial work started at go-oo.org, increase the converage of the api. * Analyse and prioritise common api usage and patterns to determine what objects/api to concentrate on. * Help new developers contribute by extending the existing work by providing support, documentation etc. * Build up a library of test documuments to get 100% imported. * Contribute to existing projects ( calc-core, ms-filters, oo-basic runtime ) to facilitate common key core objective of better interoperability.
So I guess its no harm to say that this isn’t pie in the sky, there are already quite a few pieces of vba working quite nicely natively in OOo.
hypocycloid-demo.xls - an interactive hypocycloid generator ( nice ) .
worm.xls an animated worm ( snake ), just keep the spin-button depressed to see it move.
I’ve added a page to the openoffice wiki that gives some more info on the project.
So, how can you help,
o first of all you can show interest by giving a nice big ” a ‘+1′ please” when the announcement hits the lists.
o get involved with the project, we need extra hands to help with the api, analysis and info gathering, testing etc.
o have a look at the page and contribute some code to extend the api coverage ( its easy, really!! )
o contribute sample code/documents.
o make OOo rock in terms of interoperability
I found out about the project from Michael Meeks’ blog. I think you are absolutely right about the macro compatibility problem. Once that is solved, migration from Office will be much easier. Looks like you’ve already made great strides!
Comment by Dave — January 12, 2006 @ 4:07 am
This would be a tremendous ‘boon’ to users like myself who through the years of using Excel have a library of workbooks filled with VBA macros. I have tried to make changes manually, but it takes much time and effort, for an old guy like me.
Comment by D. Gary Jones — February 21, 2007 @ 8:33 pm