Support Statement: VBA Applications

Question: Does gmStudio support VBA applications?

Answer: Yes, our VB6/COM processor can be used to help rewrite VBA codes.

I assume by VBA you mean code in MS office (Word, Exel, Access) product macros. VBA macros look a lot like VB6 and they also use many VB6 conventions; however VBA macros run within a host Office application and therefore they have access to the host Office application objects and its APIs more directly than similar VB6 code would.

When you rewrite VBA macros as VB.NET (or VB6 for that matter), the code will no longer be within the host application. You need to reference and instantiate an Office application instance and also possibly load a document. Then you will automate that Office application instance and manipulate the document.

Furthermore, our VB6 process is designed to work with VBPs and the code/COM files they reference. In order to use this machinery, the VBA code needs to be extracted from the VBA macros and wrapped in a VBP project. Its not a big deal and we have a VBA extraction tool to automate that process. The extraction tool also does some of the work relating to the changing the application to an application instance as described above.

The bottom line is the tool can be a great help with this, but it does not currently do it completely automatically, right out of the box, yet.

If you can tell us more about your requirements, that would be a help.  And if you have a VBA sample, we will be happy to demonstrate what we can do and go from there.