My hackweek project was influenced by a confluence of issues

i) 
For some time now we have known that the VBA project structure has some
influence on OLE controls strored in a microsoft document. When exporting
documents with such controls we can run into some problems. The type of problems
run from the controls are not usable to some worrying & annoying nag dialogs 
(warning the controls may not be activated or some such thing ). Typically this 
isn't an issue when roundtripping ( e.g. reading in a microsoft document and
saving it back again to the microsoft format ) this problem is normally one
seen when exporting a native Libreoffice format to a microsoft format. In some
cases like Powerpoint export we cannot export controls at all.
Now although out binary filters do read the VBA project, a fair amount of data
is skipped, ignored or not read at all.
ii)
There are some binary dumping tools for libreoffice that dump content of various
document formats but we don't have anything that dumps the VBA related records
iii)
libgsf used at one time in it's test suite have a program that extracted VBA
modules from microsoft documents however it only worked for Excel, libgsf isn't
exactly universally available. In the absence of the vba extractor that used
to be in libgsf it would be nice to be able to access ( as text ) the
Module content without having to fire-up Libreoffice
iv)
I wanted to learn python ( in a previous Hackweek about 2 years ago I had my
first exposure to python programming, I have not used python since. )


So hears what I did

a) I implemented the VBA compression & decompression algorithms, the need for
the decompression algorithm is clear, alot of the streams in the VBA container
(including the code Modules) are compressed. But.. being able to compress the
streams will also hopefully be useful, it should allow for a project structure
to be manually constructed for insertion into a document for testing by
Excel/Word etc. 

b) Wrote some simple compress.py & decompress.py cmd line tools to allow stand
alone streams to be compressed/decompressed

c) Wrote a vbadump.py tool, this tool searches for and locates the VBA project
in a microsoft compound OLE document. The 'dir' stream is the key information
stream in a VBA project, it is stored using the VBA compression algorithm
mentioned above, currently the dump tool parses and prints all the records
contained in that stream, information from the dir stream is also used to
locate and dump the Module streams. Currently the tool does not dump the
any information from the Userform streams.

d) Updated the old hackweek 'oletool.py' project, fixed some bugs and split
out some functionality needed by the vbadump tool

e) created a new module vbahelper.py used by vbadump.py, decompress.py &
compress.py

f) I had started in the previously mentioned Hackweek a tool to inspect/modify
the content of OLE compound documents ( the format used for Word, Excel etc.
binary docs ) in a manner not unlike zip. I failed in that attempt, the branch
is still there, in the remaining Hackweek time I tried to get to grips with
that, unfortunately only managed to fix a minor bug ( http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/mso-dumper/commit/?h=feature/writeable-oletool&id=944df93d70bd0b60d9c299cd2f3ca2d45b5f7658 )

bits & pieces

git log         http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/mso-dumper/log/?qt=range&q=57508ed1fa44d39354ac9251596848edbfdaf9ff..7c8934719fcb31d319d68ab477d37464b02f49af

files
vbadump.py      http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/mso-dumper/tree/vbadump.py
compress.py     http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/mso-dumper/tree/compress.py
decompress.py   http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/mso-dumper/tree/decompress.py
vbahelper.py    http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/mso-dumper/tree/msodumper/vbahelper.py

Source file     http://users.freedesktop.org/~noelp/HackWeek2013/Suse-puzzler.xls
sample output of ./vbadump.py SusePuzzler.xls  http://users.freedesktop.org/~noelp/HackWeek2013/Suse-puzzler-dump.txt

Sample Module   http://users.freedesktop.org/~noelp/HackWeek2013/Module1

Sample use of compress/decompress
cat Module1 > Module1.deflate   http://users.freedesktop.org/~noelp/HackWeek2013/Module1.deflate
cat Module1 | ./compress.py | ./decompress.py > Module1.roundtrip

diff Module Module.rountrip