XLIDE: VBA without excel

A new project called XLIDE promises something that sounds almost illegal to spreadsheet veterans: editing Excel macro code without even opening Excel. In plain English, it lets people work on the little scripts hidden inside macro-enabled spreadsheets using the much-loved code editor VS Code, on Windows, Mac, Linux, and even remote setups. No Microsoft Office install, no weird Windows-only tricks, just open, edit, save, done. For anyone still trapped maintaining ancient business spreadsheets held together by prayer and coffee, that’s the kind of announcement that makes the comments section light up fast.

And oh, the mood was a glorious mix of excitement, suspicion, and drive-by destruction. One commenter immediately went full chaos gremlin with a cheerful “Gonna have some fun with this!”, which is exactly the sort of sentence that makes office IT teams sweat. Another took the conversation in a darker direction, wondering why Excel macros still aren’t boxed into a safer playground, since they’re famous for being risky. That kicked up the familiar old panic around spreadsheet scripts: useful? absolutely. terrifying? also yes.

But the spiciest reaction came from a brutal teardown calling the whole thing a “vibe-coded week-end project” and then twisting the knife by saying it’s effectively much bigger because the main helper library came from the same author the weekend before. Ouch. So while some see a neat rescue tool for legacy spreadsheet code, others see a speed-run prototype with big “should we trust this?” energy. In other words: the app may be about Excel, but the real formulas are hype + fear + snark.