About Office Addins
Office Addins is the trading name of Clare Bullen, a sole trader based in Woodford Green, England. Our address is:
Higham Villa
3 High Elms
Woodford Green
IG8 0UP
United Kingdom
email: support@officeaddins.co.uk
Our History
When Excel 5.0 introduced the ground-breaking Visual Basic for Applications in 1993, Stephen Bullen began developing spreadsheet applications using VBA
and joined a small band of like-minded people on a Compuserve peer-to-peer support forum. They shared ideas, helped each other solve the issues they faced in this new language, built a community
and established many of the principles and processes that most VBA developers now take for granted. Many of that initial group went on to become Microsoft Excel MVPs and helped Microsoft build
Excel into the application it is today.
By 1996 the growing VBA developer community had understood the importance of making code easy to read by indenting blocks of code within procedures, conditional blocks, loops, case statements, etc.
Something that all modern languages and IDEs do naturally, but the VB Editor didn't (and still doesn't) support. By that time, Stephen was working as an independent spreadsheet developer under the
name of Business Modelling Solutions Ltd. Stephen wrote the first version of his Smart Indenter as an Excel xla addin workbook and gave it away for anyone to download and use as a simple but
effective marketing strategy. The original Smart Indenter did a great job, but was not sufficiently robust as the addin sat within the VBE and was prone to being recompiled by accident.
In 1999 Microsoft added the COM Addins extensibility model, allowing the Smart Indenter to be rewritten as a VB6 dll and providing the robustness, reliability and stability required of a developer tool.
The robustness of the COM Addins model allowed Stephen to develop more addins for the VB Editor, including the popular VBE Tools and Record at Mark. His tools have been tirelessly serving
the VBA developer commmunity in their original version ever since.
In the following years, Stephen changed his company name to
Office Automation Ltd and continued to provide Excel spreadsheet development services to a range of clients, while also co-authoring a sequence of Excel VBA Programmers' Reference books.
During his consulting work, he repeatedly enountered the same basic mistakes being made by predominantly self-taught VBA developers, so partnered with John Green and Rob Bovey - friends from the original
Compuserve forums - to write two editions of Professional Excel Development, which quickly became the definitive reference for aspiring VBA developers and is still available from
Amazon.com and
Amazon.co.uk (paid links where as an Amazon Associate,
I earn from qualifying purchases).
Stephen entered the banking sector in London, initially working on the trading floor at Barclays Capital writing pricing spreadsheets for the structured interest rates desk, then moving to Merrill Lynch,
Bank of America and Credit Suisse as his career progressed. He can now be found at HSBC, where he is an IT Delivery and Project Manager for the Fixed Income business, ensuring the Front Office Risk and PnL
systems evolve to meet the ever-changing needs of the business, markets and regulatory environment. Stephen can be contacted at stephen@oaltd.co.uk and is on
LinkedIn.
Over time, Microsoft stopped distributing the VB6 run-times and when 64-bit versions of Microsoft Office were introduced, the 32-bit VB6 COM Addin dlls were not supported. The usage of 64-bit Office has picked
up in recent years, with more and more people asking for 64-bit versions of the tools they used to rely on. In January 2024, to mark the 25th anniversary of the release of the Smart Indenter COM Addin, Stephen's
wife Clare decided to get the addins rewritten in C# and make them available for a nominal sum, under the trading name of Office Addins.