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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."

12 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. So Microsoft is at least still a *little* evil by sapone · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 :).

    1. Re:So Microsoft is at least still a *little* evil by kestasjk · · Score: 4, Informative

      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 .

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      // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
  2. that was a close one. by kellyb9 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  3. ISOfication of OOXML vs VBA by jkrise · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
    1. 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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    2. 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."
  4. Of course,MS is catering to their real customers by Coopjust · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.
  5. 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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  6. VBA for Mac by christurkel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
  7. Actually, no. Did you RTFA before submitting? by BobMcD · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

  8. 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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  9. Re:How about using .Net? by andy9701 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.