kallunwillock/chibiarc

ChibiArc is a single-file module for Microsoft Office applications like Excel or Word that lets you create and extract compressed archive files from within VBA code. VBA is the scripting language built into Office programs. If you have ever wanted to zip up files or unzip an archive as part of an automated spreadsheet macro or Word script, ChibiArc handles that. The module supports a range of archive formats. ZIP, 7-Zip, and most TAR variants can be both created and extracted. ISO files can be mounted as virtual drives and then removed. CAB and RAR files can be extracted but not created. Encryption is included. You can protect ZIP archives with AES-128, AES-192, or AES-256 encryption, or with the older ZipCrypto standard. The README explains the tradeoff clearly: ZipCrypto works with Windows Explorer natively, which is convenient for sending files to someone without special software, but it is considered weak by modern security standards. AES is more secure but requires software like 7-Zip or ChibiArc itself to open the result. Setup requires placing the VBA class file into your Office project and having the companion DLL file (archiveint.dll) available on the Windows machine. All compression and decompression work is handled by that DLL, which wraps a well-known library called libarchive. The module handles full Unicode filenames, including Chinese and Japanese characters. The module works only on Windows and requires 64-bit Office. It was written by Kallun Willock, with AES encryption adapted from open-source VBA work by WQWeto. The license is MIT.