Building an Excel Fabric Calculator – 3 Wrap Up

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Welcome back to the Building an Excel Fabric Calculator series. To wrap up this project we are going to walk through the steps to make our excel calculator look and feel like a desktop app to the end user. This means taking away the hall mark identifiers of excel and making the whole application very straight forward and easy to use.

For easier navigation of this post and to pick up where you left off in the project use these links to jump to the corresponding section.

MainSheet – OnOpen – OnClose – Shortcut

Lets jump into it with styling the main sheet the user will see. Set the background color of the entire sheet by first selecting an empty cell and pressing CTRL + A, then from the tool bar home menu choosing the bucket fill icon and selecting a background color.

From the tool bar remove the headings, grid lines and formula bar

We will also disable these options in the open event. Navigate to the visual basic GUI from the developers tab, and then from the ‘ThisWorkbook’ object.

To get this object to pre generate the on open function use the dropdown menus within the editor window

Everything put in here will be ran whenever the workbook opens.

1. This will set Sheet2 as the active sheet, or the sheet that the user sees upon opening the workbook.
2. Using a ‘With’ loop on the Application set the following
   • Disable the tool bar
   • Remove the formula bar
   • Remove the side panel for recent files
   • Set the size of the application window
3. Using a ‘With’ loop on the ActiveWindow set the following
   • Remove gridlines
   • Remove formula display
   • Remove the side and top headings of the columns
   • Remove scroll bars from where we resized the application
   • Remove the worksheet tabs

Now when the application opens it will look like this

Don’t forget in the ‘before close’ event to reset everything so that other excel workbooks are not affected by our changes.

1. From the code editor drop down select ‘Workbook’
2. From the code editor drop down select ‘BeforeClose’, these steps will pre generate the close event handler in the code window
3. Using a ‘With’ loop on Application enable
   • the tool bar
   • the formula bar
   • the recent files panel
4. Using a ‘With’ loop on ActiveWindow enable
   • Gridlines
   • Formulas
   • The top and side column headings
   • Workbook tabs
5. Save the workbook, and set the ‘Saved’ action to true, this will stop the pop up asking if the workbook should be saved when closing.

Finally we will save a shortcut to this excel workbook on our desktop and make it look like an application. To do this right click the excel workbook file and select “create shortcut”.

You can change the icon of the shortcut to be displayed for the shortcut using the properties tab of the shortcut, however the icon image must be an icon file type. Once the icon is selected simply drag and drop the shortcut to the desktop and we have an excel calculator that looks and feels similar to a stand-alone application.

You may have noticed a new page on the site with (for now) two different calculators, if not feel free to check them out. In the next project series, we will cover how the knitting calculator was made using html, css and javascript/jquery.