May 8, 2026•4 min read•from Microsoft Excel | Help & Support with your Formula, Macro, and VBA problems | A Reddit Community

I made a Discord bot that runs from a hidden Excel sheet. Because why not.

Our take

I’ve created an innovative Discord bot that operates from a hidden Excel sheet, showcasing the capabilities of Wasabi, a native WebSocket module for VBA. This project connects to Discord's gateway, enabling real-time interactions through simple JSON payloads. Users can send commands like “!ping” to receive responses directly from Excel. This exploration illuminates the potential for integrating familiar tools with modern platforms, making your spreadsheet experience more dynamic. I’m excited to share this journey and encourage others to discover what they can create with Wasabi!

There is something quietly powerful about a developer who looks at an Excel spreadsheet and sees a server. When someone builds a Discord bot that runs entirely from a hidden worksheet using a native WebSocket module for VBA, it is not just a clever hack. It is a signal. The tools we have long considered simple or outdated are still capable of surprising us when we stop treating them as static containers and start thinking of them as runtime environments. This is the kind of work that deserves more attention, because it challenges the assumption that meaningful automation requires heavyweight platforms or modern frameworks. If you have ever tried to stream real-time data into Excel using traditional methods, you know how quickly those approaches fall apart under pressure. That context matters here, because Wasabi exists in part to solve exactly that problem, and this Discord experiment reveals what happens when you give VBA a proper network layer. I built a native WebSocket & MQTT client for Excel VBA (Zero DLLs, streams live data without freezing) walked through that foundation. What this new project demonstrates is where that foundation can take you when you stop asking whether something is possible and start asking what is interesting.

The elegance of the approach is worth examining closely. Discord's bot API is, at its core, a WebSocket connection and a JSON handshake. There is no SDK requirement, no proprietary runtime, no cloud dependency. You connect, you identify, you send heartbeats, you parse events, and you respond. That simplicity is not a limitation. It is the entire point. The developer behind Wasabi understood that VBA has been starved of native network capabilities for years, and that once you give it even a basic WebSocket implementation, the doors open faster than most people expect. The bot runs from a hidden sheet, responds to commands like !ping and !get A1, and can write cell values or trigger macros on demand. It sits quietly in the background while the spreadsheet remains fully functional on top of it. That is a remarkably clean architecture for something built in a language most developers would not consider for this kind of work.

What makes this worth discussing beyond the technical novelty is the pattern it reveals. The developer is not arguing that Excel should replace your bot framework or that VBA is superior to Python for server-side logic. The argument is subtler and more compelling: the boundaries we draw between tools are often arbitrary, and when you remove them, genuinely creative workflows emerge. Being able to read and write cells via Discord commands, trigger macros remotely, or post alerts when a threshold is crossed turns a spreadsheet into an interactive system that can respond to the outside world without any additional infrastructure. It is the kind of integration that would have seemed absurd a decade ago and now feels inevitable.

The question worth watching is not whether more people will build Discord bots in Excel. It is whether this mindset spreads. When developers stop treating legacy tools as relics and start treating them as platforms with untapped potential, the results tend to be more interesting than anything built with the expected stack. Wasabi is still early, and the ecosystem around it is small, but the willingness to explore these intersections is what separates a tool from a platform. That is the shift worth paying attention to.

I already posted it on r/vba But I'd like to share this knowledge and the interesting things you can create using Wasabi with other communities as well!

So I've been working on a native WebSocket module for VBA called Wasabi, and at some point I asked myself: "can I connect this to Discord's gateway and make a bot?" The answer is yes, and it's glorious and completely unnecessary.

The concept

Discord's bot API is just a WebSocket connection to wss://gateway.discord.gg. Once connected, Discord sends you a JSON payload with an op code telling you to identify yourself. You send back your bot token and intents, and from that point on you receive events (messages, reactions, etc.) as JSON frames. You respond to them by hitting Discord's REST API with plain HTTP calls.

That's it. No SDK needed. Just WebSocket + JSON parsing.

Step 1: Get a bot token

Go to https://discord.com/developers/applications, create an application, add a bot, copy the token. Enable the "Message Content Intent" under the bot settings or it won't receive message content.

Step 2: Import Wasabi

Download Wasabi.bas from https://github.com/uesleibros/wasabi/releases and import it into your VBA project via File > Import File. No references to enable, no DLLs to register.

Step 3: Connect to the gateway and keep it alive

Discord requires you to send a heartbeat payload every N milliseconds (it tells you the interval on connect). Here's a minimal loop that handles that:

#If VBA7 Then Private Declare PtrSafe Function GetTickCount Lib "kernel32" () As Long #Else Private Declare Function GetTickCount Lib "kernel32" () As Long #End If Sub RunDiscordBot() Dim token As String token = "YOUR_BOT_TOKEN_HERE" Dim handle As Long If Not WebSocketConnect("wss://gateway.discord.gg/?v=10&encoding=json", handle) Then MsgBox "Failed to connect to Discord gateway." Exit Sub End If Dim msg As String Dim heartbeatInterval As Long Dim lastHeartbeat As Long Dim identified As Boolean identified = False lastHeartbeat = 0 Do While WebSocketIsConnected(handle) msg = WebSocketReceive(handle) If Len(msg) > 0 Then Dim op As Long op = ExtractOp(msg) ' parse the "op" field from JSON ' Hello payload: Discord sends heartbeat interval If op = 10 Then heartbeatInterval = ExtractHeartbeatInterval(msg) lastHeartbeat = GetTickCount() ' Identify If Not identified Then Dim identifyPayload As String identifyPayload = "{""op"":2,""d"":{""token"":""" & token & """,""intents"":33280,""properties"":{""os"":""windows"",""browser"":""excel"",""device"":""excel""}}}" WebSocketSend identifyPayload, handle identified = True End If ' Dispatch: actual events like MESSAGE_CREATE ElseIf op = 0 Then Call HandleEvent(msg, token) End If End If ' Send heartbeat when due If GetTickCount() - lastHeartbeat >= heartbeatInterval Then WebSocketSend "{""op"":1,""d"":null}", handle lastHeartbeat = GetTickCount() End If DoEvents Loop WebSocketDisconnect handle End Sub

Step 4: Handle a message event

When op = 0 and the event type is MESSAGE_CREATE, you get the channel ID and message content from the JSON. Then you can reply via Discord's REST API using XMLHTTP:

Sub HandleEvent(ByVal payload As String, ByVal token As String) If InStr(payload, "MESSAGE_CREATE") = 0 Then Exit Sub Dim channelId As String Dim content As String channelId = ExtractField(payload, "channel_id") content = ExtractField(payload, "content") If content = "!ping" Then Call SendDiscordMessage(channelId, "Pong! (sent from Excel)", token) End If End Sub Sub SendDiscordMessage(ByVal channelId As String, ByVal message As String, ByVal token As String) Dim http As Object Set http = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP") Dim url As String url = "https://discord.com/api/v10/channels/" & channelId & "/messages" Dim body As String body = "{""content"":""" & message & """}" http.Open "POST", url, True http.setRequestHeader "Authorization", "Bot " & token http.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/json" http.Send body Do While http.readyState <> 4 DoEvents Loop End Sub

Where to go from here

This is just the skeleton. From here you can:

Read/write cells based on Discord commands ("!get A1" returns the cell value, "!set A1 42" writes to it)
Trigger macros remotely by sending a command from Discord
Post alerts to a channel when a cell value crosses a threshold (combine with a Worksheet_Change event)
Run the bot from a hidden sheet so it sits quietly in the background while you use the spreadsheet normally

The browser and device fields in the identify payload are set to "excel" in the example above. Discord doesn't validate these, but it's a fun touch.

Full module docs and source: https://github.com/uesleibros/wasabi

submitted by /u/UesleiDev
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I built a native WebSocket & MQTT client for Excel VBA (Zero DLLs, streams live data without freezing)If you've ever tried to stream real-time data (like live stock/crypto tickers or dynamic dashboards) into Excel using VBA, you know the struggle. You either end up with a freezing UI using XMLHTTP, clunky polling loops, or you have to rely on external DLLs and wrappers that your corporate IT simply won't let you register. I wanted to solve this natively, so I built Wasabi. It's a single .bas module that gives VBA full, high-performance WebSocket (WSS) and MQTT capabilities. The Origin Story: This project started in a rather unexpected place. A group of friends of mine have the hobby of building entirely functional multiplayer games inside PowerPoint using VBA. They kept hitting a wall with real-time networking. I built Wasabi to give them a reliable network stack. Because it works across the entire Office suite, it translates perfectly into a powerhouse for Excel. Why it matters for Excel devs: True Zero Dependencies: It's literally just one file (Wasabi.bas). Import it via the VBA editor (File → Import File) and you're ready. No references, no DLLs to register. It works on 32-bit and 64-bit Office, from XP to Windows 11. No UI Freezing: It operates smoothly without locking up your spreadsheet. Corporate/Enterprise Ready: It handles secure sockets over TLS via Windows Schannel (wss://). It also supports proxy authentication (NTLM and Kerberos), meaning it works straight out of the box in locked-down corporate networks. Live APIs & IoT: You can stream quotes from Binance/Coinbase straight into a cell with millisecond latency. Plus, with the built-in MQTT 3.1.1 client, you can connect Excel directly to an IoT broker (like Mosquitto) for industrial dashboards. Community Validation: I was incredibly honored to see the project recently starred by some of the most respected low-level VBA developers out there, including wqweto and Maatooh. Even EagleAglow starred it and is now recommending Wasabi in his own vba-websocket repository. Getting started takes just a couple of minutes. The full documentation (API reference, architecture, etc.) is in the repo. Repository: https://github.com/uesleibros/wasabi Releases (Download the .bas): https://github.com/uesleibros/wasabi/releases If you have ever wanted to add real-time capabilities to an Excel project and found the built-in options lacking, this module might save you a lot of low-level pain. You can even write a Discord bot that runs from a hidden sheet! I would love to hear your thoughts, ideas, or see any crazy use cases you come up with. submitted by /u/UesleiDev [link] [comments]

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I made a Discord bot that runs from a hidden Excel sheet. Because why not.

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