Video HowTo: Creating an XLL add-in for Excel 2000 – 2007 (VB.NET)
Looking at the list of video howto samples already published, I’ve just realized that most of them target Outlook. This is no wonder at all, because every MS Office developers would confirm that Outlook is the most in-demand application from the Microsoft Office family. However, we somewhat neglected Excel, which is the second in popularity among Office programmers and end-users. I believe it’s the right time to fill in the gap.
Following the recent video sample showing how to resize the Advanced Task Pane programmatically, today I’m presenting you an example of XLL add-in for Excel 2007, of course you can do the same in Excel 2000, 2002 (XP) and 2003 as well. This sample implements two functions: one returning the square of the input argument, the other accepting two strings and returning their concatenation.
Now let’s see how it actually works:
This video sample was captured in Visual Studio 2008 (VB.NET) with Add-in Express 2009 for Office and .net.
You can also watch another video showcasing the creation of XLL add-in for Excel 2000 – 2007. From that video you will learn how to communicate with a COM add-in, how to determine the cell address from which the UDF is called from, and how to accept references to data rather than data itself.
You may also be interested in:
Advanced Office task panes for Excel, Word and PowerPoint – basic concepts
Advanced Office task panes and Office 2010 – first view
Creating Excel XLL add-ins in .net
Excel user-defined functions (UDF) tips