These articles are abridged from my book on Office to Apps migration. Going GAS, from VBA to Google Apps Script. Now available directly from O’Reilly or Amazon.
All code samples can be found on Github. Note that that VBA samples have been developed for Office for Windows and may need some tweaking for Office for Mac.
The process of migrating assets and workflow from Office to Apps is fairly straightforward.
The ‘magic happens’ step is not so hard for as long as you don’t have VBA automation and documents which are dependent on each other.
Sets of documents with dependencies that can be isolated can of course be migrated. But this is more complicated as it usually involves coordination between processes and groups of people, but nevertheless, if a cutover period is tolerable and can be scheduled and the dependencies manageable, it can be done.
When there are documents, automated processes and data that span multiple subject areas and migration timetables that cannot be coordinated, a different process is needed. One in which assets can be partially moved, and automation which can be incrementally delegated.
This is an example of some VBA automation that accesses or maintains various Excel workbooks. The data and logic modules represent the pieces of VBA code that access the data or contain the business process logic for manipulating the data.
There may be various reasons that this entire process cannot be scheduled to happen all at once. Some examples could be;
This API allows assets and automation to be migrated a chunk at a time.
For example:
Workbooks can be migrated to Sheets but still accessed from VBA by simply substituting the data access code in VBA to delegate data access to Apps Script.
Some or all of the logic functions can be migrated to be executed by Apps Script, returning the result to VBA for orchestration
All code samples can be found on Github. Note that that VBA samples have been developed for Office for Windows and may need some tweaking for Office for Mac.
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bruce mcpherson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.mcpher.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at code use guidelines