Microsoft Says VBA Is Here To Stay

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."

Comments

So Microsoft is at least still a *little* evil

[sapone]

If they had they rid the world of VBA on top of publishing their binary specs in an Open Source compatible way, their reputation bar might have ended up on the "good guy" side :).

Re:So Microsoft is at least still a *little* evil

[kestasjk]

There's no way they were going to release an Office suite without any macro capability, but the blow is that they aren't replacing it with .NET .

Re:So Microsoft is at least still a *little* evil

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

that was a close one.

[kellyb9]

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

ISOfication of OOXML vs VBA

[jkrise]

If OOXML is to become an ISO standard fully implemented in Office 2009; VBA and binary blobs will have to be deprecated and removed from the feature list.

Else, after ISO approval is sought and obtained, MS might claim it is deprecated but still provide support in Office..... either way, confused times ahead for the Office cash cow, methinks.

Re:ISOfication of OOXML vs VBA

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Re:ISOfication of OOXML vs VBA

[ozmanjusri]

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.

Of course,MS is catering to their real customers

[Coopjust]

And despite the security problems that have plagued users for years due to VBA viruses, Microsoft won't remove VBA from Office.

Interestingly enough:...

While it's true that VBA isn't supported in the latest version of Office for the Mac and the VBA licensing program did close to new customers last year, we have no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows

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

That's not the problem

[Apocalypse111]

Customers don't want VBA to go away.

They want the damn ribbon to go away!

Re:That's not the problem

[ChefInnocent]

I don't know why you were modded 'Troll'. I think your statements are accurate. There are way too many lines of VB code written for businesses to want it to go away. If they had to re-write those lines (no matter what new language will be, or what the quality of the VB is), they would more likely abandon the need to upgrade. As for the ribbon, I haven't seen it, but that might be because my company didn't think it was necessary to upgrade to the current version of Office.

Whether we like it or not VB is here to stay. The cost to convert the older stuff is way too high.

VBA for Mac

[christurkel]

VBA for Office Mac was dropped because AppleScript is far more powerful for the task and by dropping VBA you hinder cross platform compatibility. Devious.

Would have been a mixed blessing

[HangingChad]

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.

Actually, no. Did you RTFA before submitting?

[BobMcD]

The link that _I_ clicked took me to a blog that said that VBA was no longer supported, and that the licensing program had gone away. To me this means 'dead'. No support and no license means that no reputable vendor is going to nail any new shingles to this product. Any future offerings using VBA are destined to be either snakeoil or shareware.

Am I missing something here?

Re:Actually, no. Did you RTFA before submitting?

[HiredMan]

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

How about using .Net?

[mallardtheduck]

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.

Re:How about using .Net?

[andy9701]

Isn't that what Visual Studio Tools for Office does? I've never really looked into it much, but my understanding was that it was a .NET replacement for writing Office apps with VBA.

Re:Of course,MS is catering to their real customer

[samkass]

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.

Boggled

[samael]

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...

My thoughts in lyrical form

[Philotechnia]

Sung to the tune of "Chocolate Rain" by Tay Zonday
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA
(If you don't know, now you know)


VBA
So many people writing code in vain
VBA
Debugging apps is really quite a pain

VBA
Microsoft says it will not support
VBA
To C#, functionality we'll port

VBA
No rhyme or reason to deploy this mess
VBA
A seasoned coder really could care less

VBA
Slashdot will flame Microsoft either way
VBA
Now I'm confused why it is here to stay