Just recently we had a meeting with a client that demoed their current business workflow process. One of our client's very clever business users created a hacky but also amazing VBA solution for sending emails, assigning work, creating reports, etc. It works just the way they want it, and our team was there to replace it. Made me sad, because our solution will cost a fortune, won't do half of what this guy's solution does, involves a third party SASS solution with a very limited API, and so it will cut him out of his ability to customize it.
Why do people still use VBA?
181–190 of 421 posts
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#182Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#183[deleted]
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Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#184– It’s built in.
– The IDE is built in.
– The syntax is beginner-friendly.
– It’s stable and doesn’t change every six month.
– It’s well-documented.
– No build steps, it just runs, and fast.
– It’s resource-efficient (CPU, RAM).
– You can easily create dialogs and forms using the built-in visual GUI builder.
– You can break into the built-in debugger from your Office document.
– If you want to get fancy, it has interfaces and classes.
– You can call any win32 function and use any COM object.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#185The clean solution is quite simple - if you don’t want non IT people writing software then buy a product to solve the issue or hire some experienced professional developers. The problem is that a lot of time the clean solution isn’t feasible because of constraints or culture and you end up with something in the “dirty” solution end of spectrum.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#186I agree mostly with the article, VBA doesn't have to get past the pointy haired bosses or the purchasing and compliance departments!
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#187Let's face it: IT is the bureaucracy department of modern times which can keep itself 95% busy with self inflicted problems and has 5% service orientation. Processes are opaque for outsiders and typically not helpful. I really had to lough when I read the following description of the IBM BPM but this sums up a good part of the issue: "...while IBM BPM does come with a REST API, this REST API is borderline useless to…
I can find bad examples of how things work in basically every department I chose if I look long enough. Are there IT-Managed things that border on insanity? Oh yes. Are these a good excuse to build a shadow IT? No, they are not. Don't get me wrong: I'm not bothered at all when a couple analysts get together and hack away at their own little tools in VBA. Kudos to them for getting into the spirit of things, and maybe…
If IT people would only understand they are giving a service for the rest of the company… and not the way around.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#188Let's face it: IT is the bureaucracy department of modern times which can keep itself 95% busy with self inflicted problems and has 5% service orientation. Processes are opaque for outsiders and typically not helpful. I really had to lough when I read the following description of the IBM BPM but this sums up a good part of the issue: "...while IBM BPM does come with a REST API, this REST API is borderline useless to…
I can find bad examples of how things work in basically every department I chose if I look long enough. Are there IT-Managed things that border on insanity? Oh yes. Are these a good excuse to build a shadow IT? No, they are not. Don't get me wrong: I'm not bothered at all when a couple analysts get together and hack away at their own little tools in VBA. Kudos to them for getting into the spirit of things, and maybe…
Shadow IT exists for a reason and that's the dysfunctional bureaucracy of IT.
The "Circle of IT" is real. Small companies start out nimble, but then stuff gets crazy and someone decides to standardize it all under one department. This works for awhile, but eventually this organization becomes so useless that it can't serve any functions of the business anymore, so a shadow IT group is built that the business SMEs love as they just "get stuff done". This works for several years, but the executives in IT hate this "rogue" group as it is a constant reminder of their incompetence. Eventually they re-absorb this group and crush them with beauracracy until it all starts again.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#18916 years ago I developed some apps with MS Access that interacted with MS Outlook. It was rather easy given the integrated IDE, debugger and being able to create forms and call a CLI app (zip). I contemplated suggesting my managers to build something serious with some web tech -- also ubiquitous and easy to deploy PHP -- and it looked a lot more complicated right away!
Later, I used to be Django developer, and I think it would be even harder to deploy and maintain.
The only inconvenience I recall was some functions had tedious API, arrays/lists were hard, had to be created like kinda Collection.new(...).
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a sentence in the article which says that this is an explicit policy decision of the company. > It is supposedly “Against the technology strategic vision of the company” to allow “end-users” access to high level programming languages.
And rightly so. Imagine for a moment that someone in accounting built a system in lisp to automate part of his job. As time goes on, he takes on more responsibility, which he writes more lisp for. One day, he gets hit by a bus. The lisp program he wrote is now an integral part of the running of the accounting department simply by accumulation and momentum, with tons of business logic baked in. Where do you look to fi…
this already happens with Excel and access. Entire companies rely on a spreadsheet some wizard invented years ago and now no one knows how to change it, and it goes weird if multiple users try to access it at once so make sure you copy it locally first and change the file name so you can track the versions