MS Excel automation without macros in the generated reports. Any thoughts?

Question

Hello! I know that the web is full of questions like this one, but I still haven't been able to apply the answers I can find to my situation.

I realize there is VBA, but I always disliked having the program/macro living inside the Excel file, with the resulting bloat, security warnings, etc. I'm thinking along the lines of a VBScript that works on a set of Excel files while leaving them macro-free. Now, I've been able to "paint the first column blue" for all files in a directory following this approach, but I need to do more complex operations (charts, pivot tables, etc.), which would be much harder (impossible?) with VBScript than with VBA.

For this specific example knowing how to remove all macros from all files after processing would be enough, but all suggestions are welcome. Any good references? Any advice on how to best approach external batch processing of Excel files will be appreciated.

Thanks!

PS: I eagerly tried Mark Hammond's great PyWin32 package, but the lack of documentation and interpreter feedback discouraged me.

Answer 1

You could put your macros in a separate excel file.

Answer 2

Almost anything you can do in VBA to automate excel you can do in VBScript (or any other script/language that supports COM).

Once you have created an instance of Excel.Application you can pretty much drop your VBA into a VBS and go from there.

Answer 3

If it's the Excel/VBA capability that you're looking to use then you could always start by creating all of the code that will interact with the Excel files you're wanting to work on within an Excel file - a kind of master file that is separated from the regular files, as suggested by Karsten W.

This gives you the freedom to write Excel/VBA.

Then you can call your master workbook (which can be configured to run your code when the book is opened, for example) from a VB script, batch file, Task Scheduler, etc.

If you want to get fancy, you can even use VBA in your master file to create/modify/delete custom macros/VBA modules in any of the target files that you're processing.

The info for just about all of the techniques I'm describing I got from the Excel VBA built-in reference docs, but it certainly helps to be familiar with the specific programming tasks that you're tackling. I'd advise that the best approach is to put together your tasks (eg, make column blue, update/sort data etc) one by one and then worry about the automation at the end.