setup-vba

GitHub Action to prepare a Windows runner for VBA automation.

Originally part of VBA-Build, this action was extracted as a reusable setup step for Office and VBA automation so VBA-Build can stay focused on build and test workflows.

It performs three setup tasks:

• Install Microsoft Office (optional, enabled by default)
• Configure VBA security (enable VBOM access and allow macro execution)
• Prepare selected Office apps (open/initialize and close them cleanly)

Inputs

• office-apps (default: Excel,Word,PowerPoint,Access)
  • Comma-separated list of Office apps to prepare. Only these apps are installed — all others are excluded from the Office installation for shorter installation times.
  • Supported values: Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word
• install-office (default: true)
  • Set to false if Office is already installed on the runner.
• office-package (default: office365proplus)
  • Chocolatey package used when install-office=true.
• office-language (default: "")
  • Language/locale code passed to the Chocolatey package when install-office=true. For example fr-fr for French, de-de for German, es-es for Spanish. When unset, Office defaults to matching the OS language (which for the GitHub runners is en-us).

Example usage

name: Build VBA

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
    paths-ignore:
      - 'README.md'

  permissions:
    contents: read
    id-token: write
    attestations: write

  jobs:
    build:
      runs-on: windows-latest
      steps:
        - name: "Checkout"
          uses: actions/checkout@v5
        - name: "Setup VBA runtime"
          uses: DecimalTurn/setup-vba@1a34c76cc5d0e2ae3f1da2b008a4aa097da59f23 #v0.3.0
          with:
            office-apps: Excel,Word,PowerPoint,Access
        - name: "Build VBA-Enabled Documents"
          id: build_vba
          uses: DecimalTurn/VBA-Build@73d88e15e27d1e80aa402c60981175a491281d25 #v2.0.0
          with:
            source-dir: "./src"
          timeout-minutes: 20
        - name: "Upload Build Artifact"
          uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
          id: "upload"
          with:
            name: "VBA-Enabled-Documents"
            path: "./src/out/*"
            if-no-files-found: warn
        - name: "Attestation"
          if: ${{ !github.event.repository.private }}
          uses: actions/attest-build-provenance@v2
          with:
            subject-name: "VBA-Enabled-Documents"
            subject-digest: sha256:${{ steps.upload.outputs.artifact-digest }}

---

💡 Offline / self-hosted runner? If Office is already installed, set install-office: false to skip the Chocolatey install step.

🇫🇷 French locale? Use office-language: fr-fr (or fr-ca for Canadian French) to install Office in French:

- name: "Setup VBA runtime"
  uses: DecimalTurn/setup-vba@v0
  with:
    office-language: fr-fr