COM number speller

Some time ago, I was asked to provide a way to print numbers as text in Romanian language. Interestingly, I couldn't find an easy way to do this in Excel (Office 2003 as far as I remember). Searching the internet, I found other people having the same problem. Microsoft provides a solution for English language, but not for Romanian.

I decided to create a reusable piece of code that will be easily used in as many environments as possible. I chose COM and ATL to be the solution to my problem. This is also a good programming exercise for my rusty COM / C++ skills and I plan to use it as a template for all my future COM objects.

Points of interest:

• error info support by implementing IErrorInfo interface.
• Help in CHM format and context identifiers specified in MIDL source file.
• BSTR manipulation using CComBSTR class provided by ATL.
• IDispatch support, so the component can be used from scripting environments.
  
• Spelling implementation itself and support for multiple languages (only Romanian and English for now).

To install the COM object just simply run Install.bat
Here is the Excel macro that makes use of NumberSpeller COM object:

Function Spell(n As Currency) As String
'Create the speller object.
Dim s As NumberSpellerLib.speller
Set s = New NumberSpellerLib.speller

Dim o As Object
Set o = s
o.Language = "ro"
Spell = o.Translate(n)
End Function

Downloads:

• full source code, compiled DLL and CHM help: NumberSpeller.zip
  
• C++ sample code: NumberSpellerSample1.zip
  
• Excel sample file: NumberSpellerSample2.zip
  
• JS sample file: NumberSpellerSample3.zip