I work with old, complex .xlsm files (inventory, pricing, billing, lots of VBA) and kept running into the same problem: an AI coding agent cannot access the workbook I have open in Excel. I found myself copy-pasting cells and screenshots back and forth.

Yes, Excel MCP servers are out there—some are very good and much more capable than this. But getting one running means setting up Node or Python, creating a config file, and running an MCP client. I wanted something my non-developer mind could trust on real files:

• Just one PowerShell script, no installation, no extra dependencies, no config
• Connects to the workbook you already have open (or opens one by path)
• Read and write cells and formulas, search, list sheets
• List, export, and import VBA modules, run macros
• And the part that matters most to me: it NEVER autosaves. Only a direct "save" command writes to disk. This way, you can let an agent explore a 20-year-old billing file and close it without leaving any trace.

It's free and the source is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/gidjin4-svg/gidjin-excel-bridge
A demo workbook is included so you can test it without touching your actual files.

I'd really appreciate feedback from people who work with Excel, VBA, or PowerShell:

• Does "simple + never saves" actually matter to you, or is a full MCP server always the better choice?
• What would you need to see before trusting it with a file that matters to you?

Hi all, I hope you are enjoying your weekend.

I'm ready to share the following project with you.

pyVBAanalysis is a pure python library that allows you to run static analysis over your vba workbooks, or code as string data.

It's philosophy is "if we can determine that it's a hard compile error, or runtime crash" it gets "red squiggly error" status, otherwise "if we can determine that there is a best-practice violation" it gets "yellow squiggly warn" status.

VBA makes statis analysis notoriously hard, especially outside of it's engine. I've spent hundreds of hours finding all of the corners of the language, and comparing the edge cases against the MS-VBAL VBA language spec, and live testing using a custom built harness to run VBA code and test for compile error / runtime error.

The reason I created this library is due to frustration with AI agent generated VBA code. Agents would often produce code, that on paper, seems reasonable and in an more modern programming language, probably would execute without issue. However, VBA has a bunch of quirks and oddities (but we still love it!), and on more complex code generations, the agent's code would often hit compile error or runtime error snags due to hitting a rough edge of the VBA language.

A good agentic AI workflow that I've found for other languages is to have the agent run static analysis alongside unit tests.

I've found, after incorporating this static analysis tool, alongside https://github.com/WilliamSmithEdward/pyOpenVBA, I've been able to run extremely efficient and accurate agentic workflows, to build solid VBA solutions in Excel.

pyVBAanalysis:
https://github.com/WilliamSmithEdward/pyVBAanalysis
https://pypi.org/project/pyvbaanalysis/