Advanced Excel Automation

Background

Our client has a proprietary manufacturing process that uses a set of table-driven procedures encoded in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. They found that developing new processes was very difficult, requiring error-prone cut-and-paste operations when adding steps. Though they preferred to replace this table-driven process itself, they weren’t in a position to do so. They needed a stop-gap that would let them deal with these tables at the appropriate level of abstraction.

Solution

We developed an Excel-based application that allows them to build their process at a higher level of abstraction. They no longer cut and paste, but write modular tables designed to be inserted in the final process tables. Our application builds this set of final process tables from the input.

Key Features

• Advanced Excel manipulation via Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
• Provides a user-level environment for tracing and trouble-shooting, all within Excel.
• Accessing large numbers of worksheet cells can be very slow, even in VBA. We employ a few subtle tricks to maximize performance.