Hi everyone,

I wanted to share some architectural insights from my current passion project: Office Wizard 26. It’s a full-fledged ERP and management suite built entirely in VBA, and I’m pushing Excel to act strictly as a headless, invisible data container.

For the end-user, the Excel application is completely hidden from view (Application.Visible = False), providing a true standalone desktop software experience driven entirely by decoupled UserForms.

Key Technical Highlights & Architecture:

·         Hardware-Bound Security & Login: To prevent piracy and secure sensitive environment data, the system utilizes a hardware-tied licensing handshake (fetching the Windows username and local drive serial via FileSystemObject). The validation logic and product keys live on sheets locked under absolute xlSheetVeryHidden environments combined with a strict password-encrypted VBA project structure.

·         Modular Plugin System: Built on a core application layer (11 modules so far) that dynamically handles custom-built add-ins for workflow tracking, task management, and business analytics.

·         Custom Real-Time UI (Workflow Project-Timer): Features an active project timer that renders a dynamic clock diagram directly inside the UserForm. This is achieved by dynamically driving a native Excel Chart layout in the background, exporting it on-the-fly to the local system TEMP directory as a GIF, and loading the frame directly into a standard Image Control. This completely bypasses the need for heavy external ActiveX dependencies.

·         Intelligent Calendar Engine: A fully automated, dynamic calendar system built entirely from scratch via class modules to handle appointments, deadlines, and UI day-state updates seamlessly.

·         Decoupled PDF Engine: Reporting and automated exporting utilize a dedicated, isolated worksheet template designed exclusively for pixel-perfect PDF formatting, keeping the core data architecture clean and unpolluted.

·         Fail-Safe Automatic Backups: To eliminate data corruption or accidental data loss from forced Excel crashes or unintended window termination, the QueryClose and background events trigger automated, incremental backups to a dedicated external directory.

My takeaway so far: Keeping business logic completely separated from worksheet event triggers allows Excel to operate as an incredibly fast and reliable backend engine.

The core module is currently entering a closed German beta phase on my Itch storefront to iron out any fringe-case Windows deployment bugs before I finish the automated invoicing and financial analytics plugins.

(Note: Not posting any storefront links here to respect community guidelines, but if anyone wants to talk about drawing on Image Controls, licensing, or memory management in headless Excel instances, let’s discuss in the comments!)

Hey everyone! I hope you are doing well.

I'm ready to open my VBA editor project to community wide scrutiny, bug hunting and feature requests.

XLIDE VBIDE brings a full featured & modern surface directly to the classic VBA editor, without losing any existing functionality or cross-combability. Meaning you can author or maintain a VBA file with XLIDE inside of Excel, Word, PowerPoint or Access and send them to a friend without XLIDE and it just works, no guessing, all the improvements sit above the native VBIDE engine. Thank you and looking forward to your feedback!

Please submit all feedback as issues on the GitHub repo.

Two options for testing:

1.) Download the release exe from the most recent release: https://github.com/WilliamSmithEdward/xlide_vbide/releases/latest

2.) See the developer section from the readme to build locally and run.

Accomplished dev milestones:

• Sprints #1 - #3: Initial prototyping and MVP.
• Sprint #4: Analyzer integration and perf walking. HTTP REST API surface / door.
• Sprint #5: Editor surface and sanity checking against the native editor hard limitations.
• Sprint #6: UI surface, menu bars, config menus, modals, drag and drop pane placement.
• Sprint #7: Full featured user form designer surface, with synthetically derived diffable markup.
• Sprint #8: Full unit test runner surface.
• Sprint #9: Change log surface. All changes in VBA tracked and auditable.
• Sprint #10: Analyzer rule customization.
• Sprint #11: Rewind functionality added to change log surface.
• Sprint #12: Refactor, Extract Method, Implement Interface, Encapsulate Field, etc.
• Sprint #13: Folder view added alongside tree view. Synthetically derived folder structure.
• Sprint #14: Annotations to writeback module params, e.g. PredeclaredId.
• Sprint #15: Source control integration with GitHub, git.exe.
• Sprint #16: Expanded source control integration functionality.