Hi everyone,
I'm currently working with a relatively old Excel VBA macro that desperately needs to be maintained for future use. Lately, a few incompatibilities have been popping up (I won't go into specifics, but I will mention that the installation of a certain patch for a certain piece of software made by a company worth billions breaks the macro completely and utterly by installing new versions of certain DLLs) that are very difficult to diagnose.
What we really need is a rewrite of the tool in a language that doesn't change or break every few months, but I lack the time and knowledge to delve into this. Therefore, I was hoping I could just package Office 2003 (or Excel as a standalone application) along with the relevant macro-containing .XLS files and then distribute that.
1. Is this even feasible? The macro seems to have quite a few dependencies, all of which would need to be contained within the Thinapp - am I correct in assuming that the Thinapp would run in its own virtual machine (ideally using XP Pro SP3 as a base, as this is a working configuration for the macro) and therefore in no way be influenced by external factors such as third party applications replacing system files on the host?
2. Is it possible to open and save files that are in the host file system using the Thinapp'd Excel? This would be ideal.
3. What would I need to make this work? A commerical/workplace license for ThinApp is obvious, as well as volume licenses for XP Pro and Office, as well as the XLS files containing the macro in question... am I forgetting anything?
Anything else I've forgotten that might be useful? Thanks in advance!