Cause you can open, write and deploy the code right from the document itself. There is no external tools needed. Everything is baked in and works. I hate VBA with all of my hearts, but I'm going to use the tools available and with less resistance.
Why do people still use VBA?
291–300 of 421 posts
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#292Earlier 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?
God forbid code gets written to solve a business problem rather than conform to a spec sheet right?
Businesses - and jobs - only exist to solve economic problems in the real world. Everything else, including traditional accounting, IT, legal, and HR functions are just there to make the real work easier, not harder.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#293Many VBA people are just SMEs who needed to spice their work with a bit of script so they learned one thing they had immediately available to them that could be used to solve their problem.
Many of these people do not think about themselves as developers. They have primary responsibilities outside of IT structures which usually means that "more professional" tools are not available to them.
They invested substantial amount of effort to learn the language and are locked into the platform because everything they know about programming, every tip, every trick, every solution to every problem is all about Windows, Excel, VBA, etc. and they would have to essentially start from scratch if they wanted to do anything else like Python.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And the software that is installed is always 4+ years out of date. But oddly there are no “security concerns” about running 4 year old conda install that has had zero updates ever.
I don't think it's often even about actual security concerns as such but rather about following "best practices" (i.e. what some company sells) so nobody in the org can be blamed when the security fails.
This happens in physical security as well. It's rather common to have door accesses set up so that a person may not have access to go through a door, but can access both sides of the door from other routes. But there was a door-based access policy so nobody is to blame.
Sadly the main concern in many/most organizations is to avoid getting blamed for bad things, so rather than actually trying to prevent bad things, a lot of effort is used to just dissipate the responsibility away.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or just make it known that if you want support, here are the languages our IT staff know and can help you with. Otherwise, you're on your own.
That's a great way to go, but unfortunately the reality is often the folks go off and write stuff in the non-supported way. The business gets dependent on it, and then years later -- because IT is there to support the company overall -- IT gets stuck supporting it even if long ago they said they wouldn't. Sure, you can have an internal political fight, but it only goes so far when everyone there is supposed to be wor…
I've been on both sides of that kind of situation, and IMO when an IT department gets that calcified, it's a sign that their days (or the company's days) are numbered. Either the non-IT staff will get fed up and replace IT, or the non-IT staff won't be able to get their work done efficiently and the company will fail.
The non-IT staff build those things because they've identified a way for the company to improve itself, but the process for getting what they want from IT is too expensive/onerous, IT has delivered disappointing results too many times, etc. Find a way to meet in the middle, or the non-IT staff are just going to build them in their own shadow cloud account and eventually make the IT department redundant.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#296PowerShell was (and still is) the go to for me in any M$FT shop. People like to group VBA and PowerShell together but I am amazed by the vibrancy of the PowerShell community and the deep history it holds. PowerShell releases are frequent and I'm excited about what I continue to see and hear being developed.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the dysfunctional bureaucracy of IT I am not here to talk about management-bureaucracy, of which IT depts; same as all other branches one can find in established corporate culture, have more than enough. I am talking about the perceived "bureaucracy" of us tech guys here, aka. following established procedures to ensure smooth running of mission critical systems. Yes, I want things to run through code reviews. Why?…
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 a full scan over 10E9's of records.
Again, as I said elsewhere, I have nothing against non-IT departments building their own private software. I do the same. But as soon as this software wants to touch the prod-server, or any other part of the infrastructure I am responsible for, it is my job to ensure they meet the same standards as everything else in the stack.
And yes, saying "No." when it is appropriate, is part of that job.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
But unfortunately microsoft didn’t invest into VBA in 20 years, other than keeping the light on. And it lacks so many modern features. There was an attempt at a .net version of VBA (would have worked the same way, with a mini visual studio embedded in Office), called VSTA. But it was killed. So the cattle (business users) is stuck with 1990s technology.
Maybe that turned out to be more of a strength than a weakness?
A strength for whom? Not the end user.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the dysfunctional bureaucracy of IT I am not here to talk about management-bureaucracy, of which IT depts; same as all other branches one can find in established corporate culture, have more than enough. I am talking about the perceived "bureaucracy" of us tech guys here, aka. following established procedures to ensure smooth running of mission critical systems. Yes, I want things to run through code reviews. Why?…
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.
When I started work at a higher-level IT job where I can start saying yes or no like this, I wanted to say yes to everyone and never be that guy blocking people. I still end up saying no very frequently because people will not want to think about anything not relevant to their specific use case at all (how are you authenticating/who controls the app/what happens when you/the owner leave?/is there a project plan?).
I can't count the number of integrations/projects I've already dropped because I asked a few follow-up questions and never got a response. Any business that actually wants to follow the law and reduce the risk of massive data loss or other embarrassing cyber event needs to screen things, ask questions, and sometimes prevent one very smart person from setting up an undocumented rube goldberg machine that will drag down an entire team if they leave and it breaks.
Re: Why do people still use VBA?
#300Someone works on an Excel file every day and reads an article about how they can make their job easier with automation. The language and IDE are built in so it's easy to get started. It's also easy to distribute since anyone with Office can run it.