Going from VBA (excel) to Visual Studio?

At work I created a fairly complex program using VBA to simplify a paperwork system.

This consists of:

- A single xls file with about 15 sheets in it.

- Many VBA modules providing functions operated from...

- A user form with captions and buttons that run the macros.

Given the nature of the business, and how our paperwork is done, everything is in excel, which is why this solution works so well.

What I'm wanting to do is use Visual Studio 2008 to create a stand-alone program (accessing an xls file if necessary) that will do the equivalent.

I was hoping I could just add something like a "excel worksheet" object onto a User Form in VS2008, but it seems to be a bit more complicated than this.

Playing about, my total achievement consists of creating a 3 sheet workbook (in Visual Studio), and a Button on a Form, or on the worksheet which increases the value of a cell by one on each click (starting simple!).

My problem is I can't get that to compile into an exe file that I can just run, I end up getting a VSTO (which I don't understand), that installs itself into an add-on (it seems).

Am I barking up the completely wrong tree? or Is it a lot more in-depth than I though, or impossible?

Just so you know... I'm fairly good at writing code in VBA (within excel), and have played about with VB in the old days.

-----

As a midway step (on my learning path), I'm wanting to create a 2 sheet workbook with a single form to add/retrieve data... this took about 2 hours to write in excel, but I'd like it to be standalone

---

Thanks in advance.