Manage spreadsheet versioning

Question

We have a lot of VBA code in spreadsheets and a lot of time people save them to local drives. When we want to upgrade the spreadsheets we push a new version out to a shared drive but dont have any way of enforcing that people dont use the old versions of the spreadsheets.

Is there some best practice here to deploy vba spreadsheets so if someone loads an old version it wont open or will ask you to upgrade. It seems like this must be an issue for any custom solution so i would have through MS would have some solution here.

Does microsoft have a standard versioning / deployment solution for this or do i need to come up with some home grown solution (spreadsheet pings a database on startup to check version)

Answer 1

If its just the VBA code you want to be able to upgrade one solution is to separate all the code into an XLA that sits on an accessible server. then the users Excel has an addin loader that gets the latest version from the server, or you could embed the loader in the workbook. There is a working example reversioning Addin Loader available at http://www.decisionmodels.com/downloads.htm