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Why do people still use VBA?

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Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#131

Post by anthk »

orthoxerox wrote: post #119
13of40 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows ships with VBScript, JScript, CMD, C#, and PowerShell right out of the box. I recall interviewing a college guy around 2018, and he tried to educate me about how Windows doesn't have a good command line / scripting / automation solution beyond command.com. I think I still said "hire" because he had other talents, but damn.

Windows doesn't ship with C# out of the box. It ships with the runtime for .NET Framework 4.8, but not with the SDK.

I think it does since the Windows XP days, at least a CLI based compiler/interpreter.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#132

Post by rprospero »

enasterosophes wrote: post #11

When I worked for an alphabet agency, I had to develop apps for people deployed to Afghanistan. The only computers they had access to were running locked down Windows XP with no way to install anything new. They were stuck with Office because it was already vetted and installed. Therefore I was stuck with Office too, even though I'm a Linux guy. I got a fair amount of kudos building some real frankensteins for them p…

Having been in a similar, but not the same, situation, I resorted to an HTML file with some JavaScript code in a script tag. Was IE locked from running, even though the machine was air gapped? Or did you find VBA more convenient that JavaScript?

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#133

Post by anthk »

dartos wrote: post #51
vbezhenar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how's Excel page with macros inside different from random exe file from security perspective? Does Excel have some kind of excellent sandbox implementation, so it's safe to run random macros on the work machine?

Can you call os level functions from an excel macro? Can you access raw memory from it? If the answer to either of those is no, then that’s a big difference.

COM/OLE. Old as hell. Macro viruses in Office/Outlook has been a shitfest since late 90's.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#134

Post by liotier »

anthk wrote: post #129
liotier wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that dystopian environments of locked-down mandatory corporate Windows laptops with no software installation privileges, firewalled networking and even the USB ports disabled are also part of the reason for every function being crammed into the browser to the point that the browser has become an operating system host... Creativity (and catastrophes) happens where there is freedom: local scripting and browse…

>no software install... https://portableapps.com I think there's even a Lazarus IDE available for every company user who wants to create reliable RAD based software bound to corporateware.

Depends on the level of corporate restrictions. Workstations with the "developer" policy applied may do that (if they managed to smuggle the executable through the HTTP proxy, and as long as the program doesn't open an inbound port - upon which event the OS kills it) but others can only run whitelisted executables. Every day I miss the Debian computer I have at home.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#135

Post by shapefrog »

owlninja wrote: post #21
_boffin_ wrote: post #5

Because it’s amazing! /s Years ago, I heard that JP Morgan had +20k access databases on their network. The data analysts that make up companies far and wide one day discovered that they hate what they’re doing every day. They investigate the “record macro” button. Some might even find it nifty. They use it again and again. Some may even try to get smart and investigate and get curious of the code that it spat out. So…

Or possibly they went to the IT department who threw down so much red tape from their ivory tower they were forced into the "shadow IT" sector. I've seen in large enterprises where some analysts have the skills to take the Frankenstein they built to the proper level, but are met with "well we need to start a project and make tickets, timelines, requirements, etc..". They certainly have good reasons - supporting somet…

IT came back asking for a budget of $750,000 to put the macro that one team uses into production.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#136

Post by TeMPOraL »

liotier wrote: post #123
baz00 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth also pointing out that sometimes when you're in a corporate dystopian hell hole do not expect to be able to actually request or install software on your device. What is there is what you have and trying to get it changed is an exercise in taking on the bureaucracy. It's not worth it. Many people have tried and failed. Back in the dark ages, we had a horrible reporting engine in Word VBA that pulled report defin…

I suspect that dystopian environments of locked-down mandatory corporate Windows laptops with no software installation privileges, firewalled networking and even the USB ports disabled are also part of the reason for every function being crammed into the browser to the point that the browser has become an operating system host... Creativity (and catastrophes) happens where there is freedom: local scripting and browse…

Yes. At this point it's well-known that ports 80 and 443 are the two ports no company[0] can afford to block. This means, among other things, that making your product as a webapp is by far the best approach if you want to "worm your way into" corporate environments, as any worker can use it out of the box, while anything else would require IT approval.

--

[0] - Except those creating high-security environments with airgaps and whatnot, but that's a special case.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#137

Post by orthoxerox »

An on-prem clone of Airtable would be a much better replacement for 99% of software that is written in Excel VBA, but:

- you have to buy it and justify the expense, but your company already pays for Excel - if it's FOSS, then your cybersecurity will want to scan it and demand you fix every single "critical" CVE, but they don't dare block the use of Excel - you have to run it on a server, so you need to buy a server as well, but Excel runs on desktop machines and you probably already have a network share, too - the server will probably be locked down tight and have no access to other servers, while Excel running on desktop machines has the level of access of the user running it - the IT will try to lock down the server-side installation and grant you as little rights as possible (please submit an enhancement ticket if you need to change the data type of the column), but they can't tell you what you can't do in VBA

I'm not an SME, I work in IT myself, but the amount of self-inflicted hurdles in modern enterprises is staggering. I run a large team that develops ETL jobs, and I needed a database to cross-reference tickets vs jobs vs source systems vs releases vs subteams, because of course no existing system knows all this. Ended up running this in Excel with some Powershell scripts: one to scrape JIRA, another to scrape Airflow, the other to access the target database under my personal account and download the list of tables. Still easier that doing it by the book.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#138

Post by baz00 »

anthk wrote: post #129
liotier wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that dystopian environments of locked-down mandatory corporate Windows laptops with no software installation privileges, firewalled networking and even the USB ports disabled are also part of the reason for every function being crammed into the browser to the point that the browser has become an operating system host... Creativity (and catastrophes) happens where there is freedom: local scripting and browse…

>no software install... https://portableapps.com I think there's even a Lazarus IDE available for every company user who wants to create reliable RAD based software bound to corporateware.

Try getting those through a corporate DLP proxy.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#139

Post by j-a-a-p »

menotyou wrote: post #109

Let'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…

VBA is the ultimate agile programming language. The company's IT aka Bureaucracy Department is stuck with Scrum, Squads and what not. And meanwhile in the other departments people are just getting things done with Excel/VBA.

Nothing has changed. In the last century this also happened and it was called islands of automation. In my bubble back then it was considered a good strategy, let departments first play around, and if they are on to something integrate it.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#140

Post by jstanley »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #128
dmurray wrote: post #125

Earlier 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.

At this point it's not even explicit - it's an implicit decision of most companies, and even OSS projects, because it became part of the "common wisdom" of computing, part of the zeitgeist. This is where the idea of "a computer as a bicycle for the mind" died.

On the topic of "computers as public transport for the mind"...

A project I work on has some processes that I need to run that can only be initiated through the Azure DevOps Pipeline interface, and these need a "worker agent" on a VM or something, and there is only one worker agent, and some of the jobs take half an hour or more.

So the effective outcome is that despite every member of the team having a full multi-tasking computer on our desk (A multi-tasking computer each! Sometimes more than one each! Plus loads of cloud VMs), we can only run a single task at a time between us and we have to coordinate scheduling manually.

Is this the future?

It is like this because the process involves "secrets" that are meant to be hidden from the team but are accessible to the program when running inside the Pipeline. If it weren't for this secret-hiding, I could just run the process manually on whatever computer I want.

And the secret-hiding doesn't even really work, because I can freely commit code to personal branches on the repository that the Pipeline runs from, and I can run the Pipeline on whatever branch I want, so I could commit a program that prints out the secrets. Ah, but Microsoft has thought of this: if any of the secrets appears in the output, they get replaced with "***".

(Let's skip the part where this accidentally leaks a "secret" username, where I know a particular piece of text that should be output but instead all I see is stars...)

The secret-hiding doesn't work because I can just make the program output base64 of the secret. I don't do this because I don't want to start pasting secrets around in places they shouldn't be available, but it is sometimes tempting.

Anyway, welcome to the future of computing. Thanks for listening to my TED talk.

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