Garry,

thanks for the advice and the shoulder to cry on :-)

Art



On Feb 1, 6:45*pm, GS wrote:
on 2/1/2012, c1802362 supposed :



Yep.., corporate nonsense drives me nuts too. It's as if they 'think'
they're doing **TOP SECRET** stuff and nobody can do anything without
whatever level of access! It's pretty much a no brainer to create 1
common folder that everyone can access, or better yet, assign a folder
for this use that's covered by network Group Policy.

Even if you do get given a folder to store the addin, it's still going
to be a nightmare making sure everyone installs it properly so they all
use the copy on the server. By default, the Addin Manager will try to
copy it to the local machine so everyone could end up with individual
copies anyway. Might be better to put the addin & template in a
self-extracting utility (zip/exe) that extracts its contents to the
same place on everyone's workstation. (Preferrably C:\Documents and
Settings\<user name\<addin name) You can use a Windows utility named
"iexpress.exe" to do this. It's located in the '~WINDOWS\System32\'
folder.

To use iexpress:
Click the *'Next' *button when it opens;
Select Option2 (Extract files only) in the wizard;
Complete the rest of the wizard as desired;
Distribute resulting EXE to users.

When users run the EXE, they are prompted for where to extract the
files. There's no provision for creating a folder on-the-fly so if a
special dedicated folder is desired then the folder must already exist
before running the extractor. This is the best way when users need to
install addins themselves via Excel's Addins Manager because they can
simply browse to the location they just extracted the files to and
select the XLA. Once the addin is installed, updates are a simple
matter of redistributing a revised version of the project. Users must
not have Excel open when the XLA is overwritten, -OR- they must uncheck
it in Addins Manager (so the XLA is not in use) before updating with
the new version.

Note that any custom menus/toolbars you create will be assigned to the
Addins tab for versions of Excel using the MSO Ribbon.

--
Garry

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