The configuration used for this article is as follows: This article is not attempting to teach you VBA - but rather show you how your existing VBA skills can be applied to the Apple OS X platform.

It is assumed that the reader is familiar with VBA and interfacing to external functions and libraries. In this article, I hope to remedy the situation somewhat, and hopefully spur the odd developer on to take another look at VBA on the Mac. Having searched extensively on the web, I was unable to locate anything that could serve as a starting point, and provide basic guidance in how to interface VBA to external libraries on OS X. It is through the use of declare that new functionality can be provided in the VBA environment.įor a VBA developer not familiar with the Apple OS X platform, there is very little in the way of documentation available. Now, Microsoft may have failed to provide an SDK, and the developer documentation may be crude – but they did provide a VBA environment that will be recognisable to those that have been exposed to the version seen on the Windows platform, and they provided support for the DECLARE statement. On the Apple OS X platform, without the SDK, these options are not available. On the Windows platform, the Microsoft Office suite can be extended using a series of technologies such as ActiveX/COM, application specific components such as the XLL – even accessing DLL functions directly following registration of these using the Excel REGISTER function, are all viable approaches. In this article, I will demonstrate how it is possible to develop dynamic libraries ( dylib files) in C to provide custom functionality for Office 2011 through VBA from simple input and output operations using basic types such as booleans, numbers, strings, arrays and VBA User Defined Types, to the implementation of simple RegEx and HTTP POST and GET functionality. Add to that, a total absence of anything resembling an SDK, and developer reference documentation that can at best be described as rudimentary – and the prospect of developing custom Office 2011 solutions quickly appear daunting. With the release of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, VBA made a welcome return to the Apple platform.Īlas, though the VBA implementation in Microsoft Office 2011 closely mirrors the implementation found on the Windows platform, none of the many features that are provided through COM and ActiveX on the Windows platform made the journey across.

Office 2011 for mac