Why do people still use VBA?

Post by j-a-a-p » Wed, Nov 15, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

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

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, a…

Post by sumtechguy » Wed, Nov 15, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

bertil wrote: post #226

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…

Is it still something you can code with your mouse? I remember having to deal with it on my first job because the team knew nothing about coding. They had “recorded” macros by clicking around and never seeing a line of code. It was incredibly brittle: any change to the table, even adding a comment, would break it, but it allowed them to automate a task.

Post by hardlianotion » Wed, Nov 15, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

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…

Post by specialist » Wed, Nov 15, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

7thaccount wrote: post #198

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…

VBA serves an awesome niche. I once built an awesome simulator that did some pretty complex optimization stuff. The main sheet had input cells for the user, a couple of radio buttons for toggling certain features, and a button to fire off the built-in Excel solver plugin and pull certain values from that process and display it all on a GUI on the first sheet. It took me just a couple of days despite zero VBA experien…

Post by jimbokun » Wed, Nov 15, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

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…