Live

Excel & Live Workbook

An IG-XL program lives in an open Excel workbook, so that is where ATE·IQ goes. A task pane reads the sheets as context — and the live VBProject, including unsaved edits, comes with them. A 33-rule registry reviews the VBA. Everything runs against the workbook you actually have open, on your own machine.

01

Overview

One installed application serves two Excel surfaces: the task pane, an Office add-in embedded in the workbook window, and the live agent panel, fed by the ATE·IQ add-in with the open workbook's sheets and VBA as you work. Both share one project store with the standalone IDE — a workbook read in Excel is context in the desktop chat five seconds later, and everything stays on your own machine.

02

What the workbook provides

The task pane reads every IG-XL sheet in the open workbook as context, but not naively. It knows which VBT procedures the program actually calls, and each question pulls in only what is relevant: the sheets that matter to it and, in full, the modules that implement the tests under discussion. A 40-module workbook does not become a 40-module prompt.

The VBA comes in live: ATE·IQ reads the open editor state, including unsaved edits, so a review or an answer reflects what is actually on screen — not a stale saved copy. File access is deliberately narrow: workbook paths are restricted to %USERPROFILE% and OneDrive roots — the server will not read arbitrary files — and everything runs locally.

03

From open workbook to shared context

Open the workbook and the task pane connects locally — no cloud endpoint exists to configure. Each question assembles the workbook context it needs, and a completed read persists the workbook into the project, so the task pane and the desktop IDE share one context. The quality tab reviews the modules against the same 33 rules; findings carry file, line, rule id and severity.

04

VBA quality rules

Thirty-three rules — R01 through R33 — review the VBA, and the task pane and the ingested-program scanner report the same finding for the same line: consistent by construction, never by luck. Each rule carries an id, name, description, severity (error or warning), profile membership and tunable parameters: R03's max procedure length and R08's magic-number threshold adjust in settings, not in code. Only standard .bas modules are analysed; Excel class modules (Sheet*, ThisWorkbook, UserForm*) are skipped. Findings land with exact line numbers, and a banned construct quoted in a comment or a string literal does not raise a false finding.

Two profiles bundle defaults: dev keeps to bug-class rules only, while prod adds style, maintainability, performance and debug-aid rules on top. The profile is a per-user setting; individual rules can be overridden on top of it, and switching profile clears overrides — a deliberate semantic, so a profile always means what it says.

05

Proven end to end

The generated demonstration program is an ordinary IG-XL workbook, and this surface treats it as one: a question about a specific test pulls just that test's rows and its implementing code — not the whole workbook. Reading the workbook persists its sheets and VBT module into the project — which is where the Code Map's 34/34 active-function coverage figure comes from — and the quality tab reviews the same module the tester will execute.

Honest boundary Cell writes and VBA edits are genuinely different mechanisms, and the platform does not present them as one. Everything runs on your own machine and every call is authenticated; there is no remote mode. And when ATE·IQ must fall back to the saved file, it is reading the last saved copy — which can trail the open editor. The live view is primary for exactly that reason.