Blog

August 26, 2021

How to use Git hooks to version-control your Excel VBA code

Exporting your VBA modules into stand-alone .bas/.cls/.frm files is a simple and effective way to make Git aware of code inside your Excel workbooks. The goal is to end up with a separate files for each of your VBA modules so that you can benefit from the Git functionalities.

March 17, 2020

Collaborate on Excel Workbooks - The Definitive Guide

Posted by Felix Zumstein

With the global spread of COVID-19, there’s a strong push to work from home for literally everybody who can. By nature, most employees who work in an office are part of that crowd. All of a sudden, remote collaboration is a thing and creates new challenges for employees who have been going to a physical office for all their life.

February 13, 2020

How to Manage and Release Excel files on GitHub: GitHub Actions (Part II)

Posted by Felix Zumstein

It’s been a while since Part I of this blog post series. Part of the reason is that I wanted to wait with Part II until GitHub released their native continuous integration system called GitHub Actions. Well, that happened in November 2019 so it’s about time we get this moving!

August 17, 2019

How to merge Excel workbooks with Git

Posted by Felix Zumstein

Git is generally known to have a bit of a learning curve. For many, using and merging branches may already be on the list of advanced topics. But even if you are fluent with using branches and merging them, the fun usually stops when Git gives you this message: Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result. If you use Git to track Excel files (which Git treats as binary files), you’ll almost always end up in such a conflict when merging two branches.

May 27, 2019

The best free VBA developer tools

Posted by Felix Zumstein

Despite all the new possibilities to program Excel (like JavaScript add-ins, VSTO and others), VBA remains the most popular language when it comes to automate and enhance Excel. And just because Microsoft hasn’t invested in either the language itself nor the VBA editor during the last 20 years, it doesn’t mean that you can’t pimp your VBA coding experience with a few extra tools!

May 16, 2019

A better way to track changes in Excel

Posted by Felix Zumstein

Track changes in Word is one of the hottest features, but Microsoft has been struggling with providing an equivalent feature for Excel. The track changes functionality of shared workbooks has so many limitations that it was officially stamped as “legacy” and replaced by the new co-authoring functionality. While co-authoring is great (especially if you are coming from Google sheets), it seems to be a solution to a different problem. In this blog post, we’ll see why it is so much harder in Excel to track changes than it is in Word and show a better alternative than Microsoft’s co-authoring.

February 5, 2019

How to Manage and Release Excel files on GitHub: A Primer (Part I)

Posted by Felix Zumstein

We have all been there, haven’t we? Then, one day, you swear to yourself to stop this version madness once and for all and decide that you are going to move all your Excel workbooks to GitHub (or any other Git service like BitBucket or GitLab). After all, important spreadsheets deserve proper source control.