I created a class using the WIN32 API to read file version information using VBA.
Using the APIs, file information strings such as file description, product version, product name, and copyright information can be retrieved. The code was inspired by Randy Birch.
Tested with both 32 and 64 bit Office environments.
Created a class to get Microsoft Office Product Information using VBA.
Application.ProductCode returns a GUID containing multiple values including the release version, release type, major version, minor version product ID, and bitness (32-bit or 64-bit) among others.
The attached Excel workbook file contains the VBA, but the same code should work for any Office product.
Product Id : Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010
Release Type : Volume license
Release Version : RTM. This is the first shipped version (the initial release).
Major Version : 14
Minor Version : 0
Build : 6024
32-bit
I created VBA and .NET classes to read and write binary data (blobs).
Longs, strings and byte arrays can be written to a single byte array using the VBA class, written to a file, then read by the .NET version (and vice-versa).
These classes can be extended to use a file format structure that includes metadata about the data included in the blob (Zip file format for example) – but I will leave that up to the reader.
Without file format metadata, you will have to know ahead of time the data type included in the blob and read/write in the correct order.