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Why do people still use VBA?

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Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#211

Post by civilized »

sanitycheck wrote: post #145
j-a-a-p wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

I was talking about this with a friend the other week... I think what IT depts really need to do is let people go crazy with Excel/VBA, but write a script to monitor activity on xls files on the network over the long term. If there's an xls which has been in regular use for more than 18 months, and it contains macros, then it can be assumed it performs some important role and should be properly documented and checked…

No one at my company would ever let IT take over their Excel/VBA processes.

The moment IT touches your stuff, your job transforms from solving problems to writing emails and having meetings.

Any change, no matter how trivial, takes dozens of emails, dozens of meetings, and half a year to orchestrate.

If IT wants to help solve more business problems, it needs to fundamentally change its self-concept and purpose away from "prevent hypothetical bad things from happening at all costs" and move it towards "solve more business problems".

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#212

Post by jampekka »

usrbinbash wrote: post #202
f1shy wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If IT people would only understand they are giving a service for the rest of the company… and not the way around.

> they are giving a service for the rest of the company That is very true. And part of that service is to ensure that things run smoothly, securely and according to industry standards. How well would an IT guy provide that service if he were to let some unvetted, undocumented script hacked together by someone who isn't a professional software engineer, run its merry way across the production database?

From security people's perspective things would be smooth if all computers would be plugged off and their batteries removed. Oftentimes it's not that far from that solution.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#213

Post by zztop44 »

jampekka wrote: post #207
usrbinbash wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What bothers me as practically 100% shadow IT worker (to the point of buying my own devices and internet connections with my own money) is that IT-departments don't care about the users, usability or productivity almost at all (and security people are especially bad at this). And that a lot of IT people frankly don't understand IT very much. Without shadowing it, I couldn't get anything done. I have to install new (o…

I’m loving this thread. I feel like Hunter S Thompson reading the gonzo review: “okay, that’s what I do. Shadow IT.”

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#214

Post by isilofi »

layer8 wrote: post #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 inter…

- It allows a user to easily extend their current work environment (i.e. MS Office applications). Other languages and IDEs could do that, too, but not so easily. This allows users to somewhat more gracefully extend their documents/data and knowledge instead of starting all over again with a "proper" programming language/environment.

- I would not call it fast or resource-efficient, but fast enough and efficient enough for most unsophisticated purposes.

- No red tape for installation, IT cannot (easily) disable it, isn't an extra line item on any bill

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#215

Post by GuB-42 »

jojobas wrote: post #33
Aloha wrote: post #25

The 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…

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.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#216

Post by analog31 »

civilized wrote: post #211
sanitycheck wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about this with a friend the other week... I think what IT depts really need to do is let people go crazy with Excel/VBA, but write a script to monitor activity on xls files on the network over the long term. If there's an xls which has been in regular use for more than 18 months, and it contains macros, then it can be assumed it performs some important role and should be properly documented and checked…

No one at my company would ever let IT take over their Excel/VBA processes. The moment IT touches your stuff, your job transforms from solving problems to writing emails and having meetings. Any change, no matter how trivial, takes dozens of emails, dozens of meetings, and half a year to orchestrate. If IT wants to help solve more business problems, it needs to fundamentally change its self-concept and purpose away f…

This is vastly underestimated. The difference between coding and managing coding.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#217

Post by bigtunacan »

michaelteter wrote: post #41

VB(A) is like Python. It's not pretty, but it gets the job done. (* if you think it's pretty, it's because you are inexperienced and don't know the many better alternatives *) Any tool with a good ecosystem (tools/libraries/integrations) which allows you to get real work done is useful. Visual Basic as a desktop app development system (or MS Access which added DB benefits) was very useful in a large number of scenari…

Python is arguable a pretty language and it's also a fully featured language with support for classes, first class functions, and yet manages to remain relatively simple and approachable.

But even that isn't why it's popular. It has the most robust data science tools available which has created a steamroller effect and decent web frameworks in Django and Flask.

Python has also replaced Java as "the first learning language" at many universities.

So there are many reasons for it's rise in popularity. VBA not so much.

Re: Why do people still use VBA?

#218

Post by meragrin_ »

layer8 wrote: post #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 inter…

> – No build steps, it just runs, and fast.

Huh, fast? Sure, it's fast enough for its use cases, but it is not fast.

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