no one ever told me excel 2000 add-ins were just excel spreadsheets with dipping mustards (.xla)?

an excel spreadsheet with small square cells and gridlines on, containing buttons and input fields for a Template Wizard - Step 3 of 5

$an excel spreadsheet with small square cells, containing buttons and input fields for a Template Wizard - Step 1 of 5, with a path field that reads “C:\MSOffice\Templates\It's a 'test”$ $an excel spreadsheet with small square cells, containing buttons and input fields for a Template Wizard - Step 2 of 5, with a path field that reads “C:\work\xl96\wizard\It's a 'test Database”$

an excel spreadsheet with small square cells, containing buttons and input fields for a Template Wizard - Step 5 of 5, and a very 90s graphic of a waving checkered finishing flag

@bark and i were tryna figure out how formulas worked under the hood, when we found some strange xla files on the install cd.

we couldn’t figure out how to edit them in excel — opening them in excel would just do nothing — but we were able to open them in libreoffice calc, and, well.

shuppy (@delan) — [archived] 2023-12-17T11:48:16.822Z

you’re kidding

an excel spreadsheet with the text “StubData Named Range” in A1, then A3 below that read

IF(ISERROR(MATCH("%ADDINNAME%"), DOCUMENTS(3), 0)))
ERROR(FALSE)
[…]
ALERT("%CANNOTFINDALERT%")
RETURN()
END.IF()
END.IF()
RUN("%ADDINNAME%!AutoOpenFromTemplate")
RETURN()

an excel spreadsheet with the text “DIALOG TEXT” near a box with a thick border that reads “Report Manager”, “&Print…”, “Close”, “&Help”, “&Add…”, “&Edit…”, “De&lete”, “&Reports:”, and “ud01a.reports.”

they use a formula-like programming language that can (what looks like) call into dlls, and they define ui strings in the spreadsheet?