Writing Excel Addons
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Writing Excel add-ins with Delphi is a challenging project. In this article, David Bolton shows how it can be done, and highlights the various pitfalls waiting for the unwitting traveler in this largely unexplored frontier.
Despite Microsoft’s apparent unpopularity in some quarters, Excel really should place high on lists for "best software ever created." Of course, taking more than ten years to get it right helped. I think that a particular strength of Excel is its relatively open API, allowing developers to create macros and use Visual Basic For Excel/VBA for apps.
One of the lesser known Excel features is add-ins. Though you can create them with VBA, you can also write add-in Dlls in C++ and Delphi. Those doing serious development need to buy the Excel 97 Developer’s Kit (ISBN 1-57231-498-2) (EDK) book, but of course it's C/C++ oriented, and there are some traps for the Delphi programmer. In this article I show you enough to get you going. As a developer in an Excel work environment I have successfully developed many add-ins with Delphi 3, and I know of no one else doing this. There is Financial CAD, a Canadian firm whose add-ins can be used from Delphi, but I think they’re written in C++. Hey, I might be the only person in the world doing this!
Delphi add-ins make it easy for you to extend Excel in many ways- such as data capture from serial ports, data feeds, all with the speed of Delphi compiled code, which is significantly faster than interpreted Excel VBA. Let's get started, there's a lot to cover.
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