So whats the story with VBA & Office 2007 ?

I've installed Office 2007 and I'm loving the new toolbar system!

(Actually I really like it, they only large niggle I have is that changing a table hasn't changed and this needs some work, that horrid modal form still appears.

">http://www.rdg.ac.uk/its/info/training/notes/word/tables/delcells.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.rdg.ac.uk/its/info/training/notes/word/tables/&h=149&w=201&sz=8&hl=en&start=4&tbnid=DIG9I8i0_rmErM:&tbnh=77&tbnw=104&prev=/images%3Fq%3Ddelete%2Bcells%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26rls%3DGGLD,GGLD:2005-15,GGLD:en%26sa%3DN">

)

I did notice that VBA 6.5 is in the package and ready to go, so with all the hype about VSTO what is the story with VBA now?

Is VBA on a path to meet it's destiny, or is it going to stay there but Microsoft hopes that it will just fade away? Or something else?

For my mind I think VBA is fantastic, I don't want to get into the discussion about user developers, leave this for another thread, because I want to discuss the future of VBA here.

What do you think ?

Office 2007 supports VBA.  VSTO is the future of Office application customization.

Office 2007 supports VBA, because there is still a huge amount of VBA code out there, and Microsoft doesn't want to aggravate Office users like they did VB 6.0 developers by suddenly and completely dropping support for VBA.

OK ... I get that ... what where is the published road-map?

Lets not be to subtle here, Microsoft is going to have to give us the bad news sooner or later but the thing is that the competition, i.e. OpenOffice and Ability (et al) are now including, or will include, VBA compatibility so to migrate away is getting easier.

If Microsoft aren't investing much into VBA then the gap here between Office and the competition will get smaller, then it will be a straight fight on features, which Microsoft will lose because they are more expensive and buying software isn't like buying a car, it's not that emotive in the business world.

For me what gave Office the edge was the real power that VBA gave the package. For me, I would like to see VBA invested in and taken to greater heights, so it's not .Net, but it doesn't need to be! It's a managed language inside a Microsoft environment, perfect! It's easy, simple, powerful and therefore productive.

If I was a sensible business man I would be building on an advantage, not letting it slide.

Yes, VBA is powerful but it is also not secure. VSTO has the distinct advantage of having Code Access Security built in.

Check out how easy it is to create Application Level Add-Ins for virtually any Office application using VSTO 2005 SE.

SimonJ

Sabot wrote:

OK ... I get that ... what where is the published road-map?

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=163677

It seems that you answered your own question in a post back in February.

MS-Office products wouldn't be such a successful suite without VBA. It's true not more than maybe 5% of the Office users actually uses VBA, but think about all the applications out there that are being used for thousands of them.

I can't imagine myself without VBA 2007.  I wouldn't be half as productive as I'm today.

If you think you need to know a little bit more of VBA 2007, you can start reading my blog: VBA 2007

JP

neilhut said:

Pevel said:

*snip*

VBA is a critical aspect of the Office system and you should not expect it do deminish anytime soon.

From my perspective, VSTO and VBA have very different, but also very important capabilities.

• VSTO allows a developer to extend Office and Sharepoint platform, by creating new webparts, adding new Office toolbar elements and extend the applications capabilities. This requires that the person building these solutions typically is a developer who knows how to navigate VS2008 and build a well structured application that supports certain interfaces.
• VBA on the other hand is more targetted at the poweruser. Someone who wants to script repetative tasks or integrate a number of related tasks together. The entery bar to get started is much, much lower, and with "record" options, can get Office to build much as the structure of the sequential application. As a person stated on this thread. I also have a lot of imvest in VBA script.

All of my program is written in VBA on Excel. Excel spread sheet works really well with database and use spread sheet as memory and save the file is really straight forward. And most importantly, all Standard Users can run it since Excel is already installed.

I would move to VSTO if office has a build-in editor. I really don't like to use external tool to edit and debug, especially for debuging on other machines that doesn't have VS (only my PC has VS in my entire company).