The Total Cost Model is a Microsoft Excel© (Windows version) macro-enabled workbook that evaluates data from competing systems using standard financial calculations. Version 1.6 has been updated from the original (Excel 2003) to be compatible with Excel versions 2013 through 2021 (Office 365.) Many fixes have been implemented and new features have been added to the workbook. Most portions of the workbook seem to be compatible with Excel 2010 with the exception of the PowerPoint export feature which definitely does not work.

A graduate student developed this model as a Masters’s degree project to accompany the research paper, “The Economics of Open Source Software – A Model for Total Cost Analysis.” It was submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Management Information Systems at California State University, Sacramento, Spring 2004 as original material based on previous research.

If you don’t use the Total Cost model, as such, the VBA code it contains is quite extensive and can save you hours of research. Procedures such as the Export multiple worksheets to a single PDF document, and others, are discussed in detail in other posts here on this website.

Get the Total Cost Model…

Get the Total Cost Model and see how it works. It is free to copy and use in your own projects. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

Version 1.8 contains over a hundred fixes, updated error handling, and several new features. A new 25-page (up-to-date) User Guide is also included in the download archive. Many of the new features and fixes are described in this post.

UPDATE: Microsoft now blocks all macro-enabled files that were downloaded from the Internet or other “untrusted sources.” Read this post to find out how to fix this problem.

From 2004…

This is the complete The Economics of Open Source Software – A model for total cost analysis ISO file. It includes the Total Cost Model, the research paper, and printed materials (papers, books, and articles) used in the research. It was created in 2004 and is presented here free of any charge. The software is compatible with Excel 2003 and possibly 2007.