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I have a series of big excel files that work like a program, but I hate beeing tied up (stuck in VBA for excel 2003), so...

Whats the best way to implement a gui over a excel vba program (office 2003)? (are there any tools for that... I want to move away from the office suite, but still have it in the background)

Or what's the easiest alternative for migrating this code to a more open language. Any ideias?

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Wow, tough ask. It depends what you're doing. For instance, you could migrate the VBA code to a Visual Basic.NET platform, and then do the UI inside VB as well ... lots of possibilities. – Randolph West Mar 8 '10 at 12:53
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Are you also trying to avoid the requirement of an Excel license for each user? – PaulWaldman Mar 8 '10 at 16:05
Without trying to move this to a discussion, I really would like to move away from M$, due to licensing costs – Krazy_Kaos Mar 8 '10 at 16:14
@Randolph Potter: Have you got any experience in migrating VBA to VB... is it much pain?? – Krazy_Kaos Mar 26 '10 at 11:42
I've moved from VBA to .NET and it's a pain. Usually it makes more sense to re-design the application for the new platform, than port it directly. – Randolph West Mar 31 '10 at 6:07
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2 Answers

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You can design userforms to act as the UI then use application.hide to hide the Excel interface, so the user never sees Excel. I've done it on a few projects in the past with no problems.

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Since you mention licensing as a reason. LibreOffice might work for you. Probably nothing will just work without some conversion on your part. Depending upon what is being done, you can do a surprising amount in a simple web application, with any number of languages available for free.

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