It's all I know how to use lol I'm not kidding. As a financial analyst I'm highly productive with VBA, and don't know anything else (I can do a little C++)
Why do people still use VBA?
311–320 of 421 posts
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#312[deleted]
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
A strength for whom? Not the end user.
It depends on the user. I use the basic VBA components to build my own features (exactly how I want them). I'm happy that Microsoft isn't meddling.
The lack of basic functionalities like generics, sort functions, lambdas, is a hinderance if you got a taste of .net.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Implementing prohibitively tight security and mandating that any files are shared through a product with security footprint of Onedrive is crack-smoking-monkey level of insane.
From an IT security perspective, maybe that's insane. From a job security perspective it makes a lot of sense. That's the “Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM” idea.
The most important part about OneDrive is it offers a CYA level of monitoring and control.
We're doing 'the cloud' wrong, rather than it being a way to leverage BYOD and easier access to information, we're going the opposite way.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#315The real answer as pointed out in this document is simple - IT Security and Administrative policy in non-technology companies trends towards restriction and justification rather than permissiveness. I work in a role that develops air gapped custom communications system, my title is engineer - and to that end I have a broad cross domain knowledge - including traditional system administration tasks. I have to go thru s…
> IT Security and Administrative policy in non-technology companies trends towards restriction and justification rather than permissiveness. I work in a tech company and the IT department is like that. The worst part is that IT/security is separate from the operational branch, and they don't care if it impacts our projects. Even though we are the same company, it seems they only care about their own profits (we get b…
I'm trying to explain to our IT that we need to match our customers expectations on how to interface with them, not the other way around, that has so far, either fallen on deaf ears or not made it to the correct person.
I have a ticket open about MX Resolution failures on outbound email to a certain subset of customers - IT keeps blaming unspecified configuration errors on the customer side, not a misconfiguration in our infrastructure. If they gave me a RCA and told me what was wrong, I'd be happy to go to the customer and tell them what's wrong. They won't do that though, nor will they open up a ticket with our vendor to resolve or investigate the issue on our end.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a customer focus? Are you trying to unblock people as fast as possible to solve their legitimate business need? Or are you using these as excuses to effectively say no to anything anyone proposes? If yes to the first, you’re a unicorn in an ocean of IT departments that do nothing but block.
> Do you have a customer focus? Indeed I have a customer focus. My customers are the people and businesses who rely on the fact that the production servers run smoothly. And I serve their legitimate business needs, among other things, by not allowing some gung-ho hacked-together unvetted magic spreadsheet to kill runtime performance by performing a blocking query with deep joins that forces the DB server into running…
The real answer is "ok, that is a bad idea for XYZ reasons, what problem are you trying to solve? is there another way we can help you solve for it? Maybe a cheap replica would work for you?"
And look, i have nothing to go off but the justifications and choice of words in your replies. But in my experience this attitude of "high priest protecting the gates of production from barbarians(company staff)" is strongly correlated with obstructionist IT departments that everyone resents and tries to work around, and chokes the company. Resulting in the creation of the shadow IT mentioned in many other replies - because IT doesnt serve the customer needs of the employees. You might not care , or see that as your job, but thats exactly the problem that so many threads on this post are discussing.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#317I'm glad I've worked primarily in early SV startups. None of this BS to deal with.
Why BS? It appears to be incredibly useful for a lot of people. You don't seem to have had a long career, let me tell you that it pays to keep an open mind.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#318VBA is a lovely language, that supports object-oriented programming (with composition... no inheritance). It has deep access to and control of Excel. It's mature and stable (Microsoft is no longer significantly changing it). "Real programmers" hate on it largely because of all the amateur spaghetti VBA code written by the business people (that the programmers are occasionally asked to debug).
Counterpoint: VBA is an awful language, other than its access to/control of Excel, Word, etc. It's full of bizarre quirks, like control characters in code that are localized.[1][2] Want your code to run on non-English installations? Better dynamically build all of the strings that are passed to that type of function using placeholders like Application.International(xlDecimalSeparator), making your code much less read…
There are quirks in JavaScript too right? When I hit a VBA quirk, I write a rectifying function around that quirky functionality. I use the custom function going forward, and never deal with that quirk again. I agree that there are a lot of quirks, and the Excel object model is byzantine. Relying on vanilla VBA / object model isn't a good idea. But, with some investment, one can be very effective in VBA. The syntax is simple / clean.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm very optimistic about Project Jupyter style notebooks. I believe, without any evidence, that they have much greater potential thoughout IT, devops, whatever. Example: Imagine a CI/CD pipelines using notebooks. I hate Jenkins/Hudson style build systems so much I could just spit. I just want to run a shell script. (Alas, I haven't had the gumption to try this idea out yet. Soon.)
Jupyter style notebooks are already becoming the next VBA in some fields. And this is not a good thing.
Why? The usual suspects? Lack of version control? Hard to deploy (reproducibly)?
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
You get it, "record macro" is the key to this. MS could switch them to C# or JS or python or whatever, if they just added a button which did that.
This is the interesting thing. I haven't played with it myself but seems MS is trying that with their new Beta python script function, but their implementation is just crazy, completely handicapped. Can't see it being a true replacement for VBA in excel.
I haven't investigated the python implementation at all since i no longer work with VBA and or Excel in that fashion anymore. How have they handicapped it?