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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."

4 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 :).

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

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

  3. 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.
  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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