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Microsoft Says VBA Is Here To Stay

Posted by kdawson on from the thought-we'd-seen-the-back-of-it dept.

Angostura writes "Microsoft's team blog for Microsoft Excel and Excel Services has responded with a denial to the earlier report that Visual Basic for Applications will disappear from Windows Office in 2009. The Slashdot discussion on the report on Tuesday got pretty animated."

10 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. that was a close one. by kellyb9 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh thank god... don't know what I'd do without that!

  2. That's not the problem by Apocalypse111 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Customers don't want VBA to go away.

    They want the damn ribbon to go away!

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  3. Would have been a mixed blessing by HangingChad · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I absolutely hate VBA but it's conflicted because I've made so much money untangling some spaghetti coded VBA nightmare cobbled together as a spare time project that became a legacy application no one can live without.

    Hate the language, love the money from fixing it.

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    That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
  4. Re:ISOfication of OOXML vs VBA by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Agreed. VBA obviously can't be part of the ISO-ificated OOXML. VBA is probably going to be considered a 'legacy' feature, with recommendations that customers do new development on VSTA/VSTO.

    If history is any judge, many VBA apps will one day not work in future versions of Office anyhow. MSFT does plenty to break compatibility between releases. In fact, some VBA apps developed for Office 97 won't work on Office 2000 or later.

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    My blog
  5. Re:Actually, no. Did you RTFA before submitting? by HiredMan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    VBA is gone from Office for the Mac and VBA developers is closed. Microsoft is acknowledging that both these "clues" that made people conclude that VBA in Office was going away are true - but they contend that VBA in Office is not going away.

    "The facts you cited are right - but your logical conclusion was wrong. We're Microsoft and we are not bound by logic."

    Basically.

    =tkk

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    Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
  6. How about using .Net? by mallardtheduck · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What I would like to see would be a .net based macro system in Office. Something where we could write macros in VB, C#, Python, or any other CLR language.

    Since .Net has built-in support for different trust levels, code signing, etc., security should be more manageable.

    Most of the work is in fact already done. The Microsoft.Office.* hierarchy already exists in .Net, all that is really needed is a way to embed .Net code in MS Office documents.

  7. Re:ISOfication of OOXML vs VBA by ozmanjusri · · Score: 4, Insightful
    If history is any judge, many VBA apps will one day not work in future versions of Office anyhow.

    Actually, that should happen sooner rather than later, so this announcement is a retrograde step.

    DDE, OLE, COM and DCOM are fundamentally flawed models which were developed in a much less fraught security environment than we have now. VBA is heavily tied into that same flawed architecture.

    Microsoft has tried to address the exposures by disabling macros by default in Office, but the control they provide isn't fine-grained enough to do more than pass the buck to the customers who have to enable the lower security levels to get their documents working.

    They do have an answer in .NET, but until Office is re-written for that platform, and until there's some sort of converter for the massive collection of existing VBA to VBA.NET, they're stuck with the risky and clunky security fix.

    --
    "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
  8. Re:Of course,MS is catering to their real customer by samkass · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Looks like MS may be crippling the Mac version to stop enterprises from moving on from Windows.

    Vista needs some competitive advantage over MacOS X, I guess. Since OpenOffice supports it, though, I suspect most Mac users would rather give up MS Office than MacOS when possible. Considering the Mac is growing 2-3x the industry rate, tying Office to Windows in this manner is just Microsoft nailing one more nail in their own coffin.

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    E pluribus unum
  9. Boggled by samael · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Has anyone actually read the original explanation for why Office 2008 isn't getting VBA?

    http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/

    Which makes it very clear that there are good technological reasons for dropping it. Or, at least, it's going to be such a huge amount of work to bring it natively to Intel that it's not worth it to MS.

    I mean, sure, some people at MS may be happy about it vanishing, but it doesn't sound like a conspiracy to me...

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  10. Re:So Microsoft is at least still a *little* evil by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I work with big banks on the fixed income side, and most traders have some excel spreadsheets with custom macros developed by internal IT. MS has to keep new version backward compatible. There is no way MS will break these spreadsheets, or else they'll piss off plenty of rich people and big companies.