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Ask HN: Best Tool for Creating Binary Running in Windows Enterprise Environment?
I'm helping a friend with an enormous Excel+VBA solution that reads an input excel sheet and outputs numerous sheets with calculated values (think like a time report or something).
I've been thinking about some way to do this in a more sane programming language. The logic itself is simple, and I could probably write 100 lines of Python to replace the whole thing, with openpyxl for creating new sheets.
There's no need to use Excel+VBA except that anyone can run it, i.e no one except my friend need to inspect/modify the code.
However, the end users are in a (I'm guessing) pretty locked down Windows environment and my Windows skills are severely lacking.
Can I use something like py2exe and have end users running the binaries in a normal Windows enterprise settings, include reading and modifying files in the folder where the exe is running? If not, is there something else, besides the current solution that is resonable?
- sevensor 8y agoWhatever you do, don't specialize the tool too much, even at the cost of the users having to do more work. The more assumptions you build in, the sooner it's going to stop working for them and they all go back to Excel. Furthermore, I'd swallow my pride and write something in VB.NET. Under the circumstances, it sounds like that's the only thing the users have a ghost of a chance of maintaining.
- jki275 8y agoC# is your friend here. Most Windows deployments even come with the compiler. It's more likely they'll have csc.exe on their machine than a python interpreter.