I know that the web is full of questions like this one, but I still haven't been able to apply the answers I can find to my situation.
I realize there is VBA, but I always disliked having the program/macro living inside the Excel file, with the resulting bloat, security warnings, etc. I'm thinking along the lines of a VBScript that works on a set of Excel files while leaving them macro-free. Now, I've been able to "paint the first column blue" for all files in a directory following this approach, but I need to do more complex operations (charts, pivot tables, etc.), which would be much harder (impossible?) with VBScript than with VBA.
For this specific example knowing how to remove all macros from all files after processing would be enough, but all suggestions are welcome. Any good references? Any advice on how to best approach external batch processing of Excel files will be appreciated.
Thanks!
PS: I eagerly tried Mark Hammond's great PyWin32 package, but the lack of documentation and interpreter feedback discouraged me.
You could put your macros in a separate excel file.
Almost anything you can do in VBA to automate excel you can do in VBScript (or any other script/language that supports COM).
Once you have created an instance of Excel.Application you can pretty much drop your VBA into a VBS and go from there.
If it's the Excel/VBA capability that you're looking to use then you could always start by creating all of the code that will interact with the Excel files you're wanting to work on within an Excel file - a kind of master file that is separated from the regular files, as suggested by Karsten W.
This gives you the freedom to write Excel/VBA.
Then you can call your master workbook (which can be configured to run your code when the book is opened, for example) from a VB script, batch file, Task Scheduler, etc.
If you want to get fancy, you can even use VBA in your master file to create/modify/delete custom macros/VBA modules in any of the target files that you're processing.
The info for just about all of the techniques I'm describing I got from the Excel VBA built-in reference docs, but it certainly helps to be familiar with the specific programming tasks that you're tackling. I'd advise that the best approach is to put together your tasks (eg, make column blue, update/sort data etc) one by one and then worry about the automation at the end.
Related
I'm working on a go project for spreadsheet manipulation.
All the code of my main application is sorted, but I want to be able to add a feature where a user of my tool can select an option on the GUI, which leads to the excel file they have selected being opened, and allows them to interactively select ranges from the workbook, which are then retained and used by my tool in the rest of the program
The issue I'm finding is that, apart from a matlab library/function which can do this (https://uk.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/importtool.html) there don't seem to be any other options for this I can find. Using Matlab wouldn't be ideal for my purposes as I can't really compile it as an exe to be used on any computer (which is a big part of my goal)
I'm happy to try my hand at using another language in order to make use of any libraries there may be for it, particularly if they are libraries for a very commonly used language (C, C++ would be ideal)
Can anyone think of any useful examples which might be relevant to my aim?
I found that there were no obvious libraries perfect for this in any common language; the best option for this appears to be just using a Go library which can interact with COM to open a file and subsequently take input from interactions there, which will then have to be fed into the rest of my program
The Go Ole library seems the best for this https://github.com/go-ole/go-ole
I have a scenario where I want to search the whole scripts stored in the file cabinet for a particular logic. Is there any good tool or bundle to accomplish the same?.
I just use Eclipse and search the workspace, when I have a need like that. For me, it is usually right after starting a new company, when I'm reviewing all of the existing scripting. Just pull all scripts to Eclipse (I recommend doing that periodically, anyway, so you have a backup), then search the workspace.
Not the fastest way, I'm sure, but it has always worked for me. :)
I think #W3BUGY's way is more intuitive. IDE can help you efficiently. But if you want the search execute in NetSuite. You can use a Map Reduce Script to make it. Here are some sketchy steps. Hope it helps.
Search javascript file within your target folder. (GetInput)
Get each one's internal Id, load file, get contents and search the text in it. (Map)
Return the result by mails or save to custom record (Summarize)
I want to build an application that displays the content that user types on the command prompt to the display like a presentation.
I am writing this application in golang. If there are existing libraries that I can use to do this great and if not would need direction how to approach solving this.
I did search on the internet for pointers but found none.
Have a look at the present tool, it does a similar thing using flat files and might even be useful for you.
https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/present
Can I make a ruby file (e.g script.rb) unreadable to a user?
The file is on an Ubuntu (offline) machine. The user will use a local Sinatra app that will use some ruby files. I don't want the user to see the code in some of those files.
How can I do it?
EDIT:
Can I setup the project in a way that the user will be able to start the app but won't have access to specific files in it?
Thanks
Does that correspond to what you are searching for ?
chmod yourfile.rb 711
As I said in my comment it is literally almost impossible to hide the content of your ruby source file, many people try this in many different ways but it is almost always trivial to reverse engineer. There are some "suggestions" for making your code hidden but they never really work still, here are a few;
Obfuscation - The process of making your code executable but unreadable, using a tool like ProGuard for Java (there are ones for most major languages) will try to make your code a mess, and as unreadable as possible while still maintaining execution speed. Normally this consists of renaming variables, using strange characters and generally hiding, moving or wrapping functions in complicated structures.
Package the interpreter - You can use a tool like ocra to package the script up inside an executable with the interpreter and standard library, but anyone with even a tiny bit of experience in reverse engineering will be able to easily tear out the source code given a small amount of time
Write a custom interpreter - Now we are getting somewhere with making it harder. Writing a custom interpreter will allow you to compile your script to a "bytecode" that can then be executed. This is of course a very time consuming, expensive and incompatible solution when it comes to working with other code bases.
Write most of your code in C and then call out to it via extensions - Again this mostly moves the problem but its still there. It will take more time but anyone can easily pull apart the machine code of the C library you load in and bob is your uncle they have the source code.
Many more alternatives - This isn't a comprehensive list, I am probably missing a few ideas or suggestions.
As far as it goes making code unreadable is hard a better solution might just to be consider providing a licence agreement with your code. That way, someone reads or modifies the source file you can take them to court for a legal settlement.
Extract your code and its functionality to an external API. And then provide it as a service. This way you don't have to expose your source code to your 'users'.
I recently automated the creation of Powerpoint Presentations in a site I'm making. I found the Office Interop libraries extremely simple to use.
Office isn't built for this kind of thing in a webserver environment, so I'm looking at creating the Powerpoints using Open Office XML, only it's so extremely complex. For example I downloaded some code to create a blank presentation with some text. This code was around 300 lines! Using the Office Interop libraries I could do the same thing in just a couple of lines of code.
I don't have time, nor do I want to attempt to learn how to interact with the Open Office XML libraries, so I'm hoping someone has made a wrapper for the Open Office XML libraries. So far all my searching has only given me one result, Aspose Slides for .NET. This looks really hopeful, but it also looks rather expensive
Has anyone ever used a decent wrapper or alternative before?
If you are looking at automating the creation of Powerpoint presentation files, I'd say you continue with OpenXML, there's nothing better than it. Everything else is either paid or don't offer entire gamut of functionality that Open XML can provide.
If you find creating a blank file tedious, you could save an empty file somewhere and use that as a template for performing further operations on it.
The only thing close to a wrapper for PowerPoint I've found is the Open XML PowerTools. It includes a PresentationBuilder class which can be used for some specific tasks like combining slides from multiple PowerPoint documents into a new document. Although its pretty limited in its functionality you could extend the class.
However, I've come to the conclusion that there just is not a good wrapper out there so I've had to do what everybody pretty much recommends and that is using the Open XML SDK Productivity Tool and the Reflect code button.
I put together a basic presentation then Reflect Code and put that into a class. Yes its a lot of lines of code and its not the most elegant solution but it does work. Then from there I can extend or modify that class to do the specific things I need to do with each slide. The Productivity Tool is a big help for figuring out the code need to do specific things. I try to keep it simple and just do one or two things at a time, Reflect Code, then look at the code to see what it does.
You could try SoftArtisans PowerPointWriter, it has a template mode that allows you to start with an existing PowerPoint file with a few place holders, and merge your data with your presentation with as little as 5 lines of code.
Disclaimer: I work for SoftArtisans