Save Time with your Excel Add-in Deployments!
Creating your add-in for Excel is part of the task. And now, getting the add-in installed on your customer desktops is your next task. Manual Excel add-in deployment to a number of customers can be challenging. Getting your customers to manually install your add-in can be a headache (for you and for them). The manual process can be error-prone. What set of manual steps isn’t? You can expect a number of help requests to come in to assist in manually installing the add-in.
To save yourself, as well as your customers a fair amount of time, automate the deployment or installation of your Excel add-ins. The automated deployment is fast, reliable, and best of all easier for your customers.
Saving all this time has real value. Consider the cost comparison presented in the table below.
| Excel Add-in Automatic Installer | Estimated Cost for Manual User Installation (for 1,000 users) |
|---|---|
| No complicated instructions to follow. Installation 'just works'. | Documentation and distribution of required manual setup steps for each version of Excel ($1000) running among your customers. |
| Automatic registration of your XLLs and XLAs. All your customers need to do is run your setup program. Automatic unregistration will hep make uninstalls easy too. | Manual execution of setup steps by your internal customers ($10,000). All that time spent by all those customers adds up. |
| Requiring no manual steps will help to minimize your installation support needs. | Installation support ($10,000). The installation questions will come. This could be much higher with a less experienced customer base. |
| Reuse the automatic installer for many of your add-ins to get an even greater return. | The manual deployment and installation cost is incurred with each add-in you release. So, look a the number below, and plan on that expense each time you need to deploy. The deployment costs simply add up over time. |
| $99 one-time cost or... | >$20,000 recurring expense with each deployment |
What is the PowerUp Add-in Automatic Installer?
This is a redistributable that will work with your install package (such as WIX, InstallShield, or basic batch file…) to accomplish the following.
- Automatically install your Excel add-in for each version of Excel.
- Control whether to install for all versions of Excel installed, or target single versions.
- Automatically remove your add-in’s configuration within Excel for all versions or target specific versions.
- Run with command-line parameters, or run with an XML configuration file.
- Works with Excel 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016.
You’ve created the perfect Excel add-in. Now get it deployed!