A few days back, I stumbled upon this page, where Frank Rice describes how to use VBA to list all VBA macros and functions a Workbook contains. I thought that was interesting: it’s not the type of VBA code most commonly seen, and the idea of VBA code interacting with VBA code is fun. So I tweeted it, and Charts GrandMaster Jon Peltier, in his own words,  could not “leave anything alone, and made some changes to how the procedure worked”. Nice changes, if I might add.

I am not one to leave anything alone, either, and wanted to check how well that would work using C#.

Disclaimer: I have done enough checking to know that the code works in non-twisted cases, but this is far from polished. This would need some handling for exceptions before making it to anything shipped to a client you care about, for instance. My goal was to provide a solid code outline, feel free to modify to fit your needs.

The class/method below takes in a fully-qualified file name (i.e. with the full path, just what you would get from an OpenFileDialog), and searches for all the procedures (sub or function) defined in VBA.

As a bonus, I added some extra code to extract the signature of the procedure, and the header comments. The signature - what arguments it takes as input, and what it returns - is a much better summary than simply its name, and I figured that if the author bothered to add comments, it was probably extracting that, too. It also illustrates nicely some of the functionalities of the API.

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Recently, a client asked me if it was possible to create an Excel scatter plot of his products, adding a label on each data point, and using different colors and symbols for different types of products. You could think of this as plotting 5 dimensions at once, instead of the usual two.

I quickly coded a VBA macro to do that, with a sample workbook to illustrate the usage. The macro is pretty rough, but was sufficient for my needs as is, so I haven’t put extra efforts in: feel free to improve upon it…

Here is a sample of the output:

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