Must Have Tools for Excel Development

 

Tools Included on This CD

Excel Utilities

There are several great development utilities available for the VBE, but the Excel Utilities is the only comprehensive add-in aimed at Excel user interface development. The Excel Utilities provides a set of 30 features that you'll use on a daily basis. These utilities greatly simplify numerous activities involving defined names, worksheets, shapes and application settings, as well as including some nifty shortcuts and selection tools.

Performance Monitor

The PerfMon utility is a set of three DLLs, used to measure the performance on VBA code. By using this tool during the development process, we can optimize the performance of our code. See Chapter 17 - Optimizing VBA Performance for more details.

Smart Indenter

The Smart Indenter is a utility to tidy up VBA code by rebuilding the indentation of each line. Most developers naturally indent code within control structures, such as For...Next, If...End If, etc. Many developers also indent all the code within a procedure, to ease identification of line labels, error handling blocks etc. From that point on, there is much more variety in indenting styles, ranging from how to treat declaration lines to handling end-of-line comments. The CD includes versions for the Office 2000-2003 VBE and Visual Basic 6. More information about the Smart Indenter can be found at www.oaltd.co.uk/Indenter.

VBA Code Cleaner

During the process of creating VBA programs a lot of junk code builds up in your files. If you don't clean your files periodically you will begin to experience strange problems caused by this extra baggage. Cleaning a project involves exporting the contents of all its VBComponents to text files, deleting the components and then importing the components back from the text files.

VBE Tools

The VBE Tools adds a number of enhancements to the Office 2000-2003 VBE, each of which can be individually enabled in the About dialog. More information about the VBE Tools can be found at www.oaltd.co.uk/VBETools.

 

Other Tools We Recommend

MZTools

http://www.mztools.com/

Excel Name Manager

http://www.jkp-ads.com/OfficeMarketPlaceNM-EN.htm

 

More Excel Utilities

More fine (and free) Excel utilities are available from the authors’ web sites:

http://www.oaltd.co.uk/

http://www.appspro.com/