Surely the answer is somewhere between the two? I don't do this much and I'm pretty sure macropod knows more about the practical side of it than I do. But generally speaking, you can "sign" the program, and the intended victim — I mean beneficient — can tell his copy of Excel to trust signed documents, and there you are.

Or if there's such a thing as a trusted folder (I didn't know about that one) then once the user has told Excel to trust that folder then you can move ahead of this problem. If this is on a work computer, probably the admins have set up the trusted folder and the user doesn't have any control over trusting or not trusting documents that reside there; you just have to get them to move your program there, or to give you the authority to do so yourself.

I've also been asked, when trying to run one of my own programs from a shared drive, whether I want to make this a trusted document. I infer that if I were to answer Yes it would never ask me again whether to allow macro content in that document.

NoSparks' answer wasn't complete wrong, and the principle he described is basically sound. It's just that there are ways to establish trust BY AGREEMENT.