January 1st, 2010, 9:25 am
JaiBajrang seems to have encountered the decision by MS to not let other firms use it in their products anymore, this is different from VBA being removed from new MS products.I have spoken with the Office team, as have a number of other people, and they understand how suicidal abandoning VBA would be.You need to understand how corporate Windows usage is managed....Imagine a firm where 90% of people don't use VBA, and that Excel 2015 doesn't support VBA, that's the earliest possible date since Office 2010 will.That is a pretty rare outfit since many people use VBA solutions without knowing.But no IT department will really like the idea of supporting mutliple versions of Office, and importantly most large firms have a "standard build" of Windows.They do not sit with the DVDs and install Office, Bloomberg, various database clients, security stuff, default Windows settings, and of course the corporate logo as the desktop picture.You're looking at >20, maybe 50 or more bits of s/w and anything up to 200 settings for Windows and applications.Multiply that by thousands of PCs, and you guess quickly that there are many ways of "imaging" Windows on to a PC, and that getting it just right is a significant engineering effort.Some apps screw with each other, there is DLL hell, the issues around different countries character sets and Oracle trying to shaft you over licensing.So if a significant group can't use the latest version of Excel, then easily the path of least resistance is not to upgrade to the latest version of Office.Also VBA (and XLL) solutions are often critical to many important business processes, so even the rump 10% I cite wound understate its importance.The biggest competitor to Excel is not the flimsy open source efforts, but earlier versions of Excel. Even the poor fools whose golf obsessed IT management make them use Excel 2003 (AKA "the one that never worked"), rarely demand upgrades. MS makes no money from Excel unless you upgrade, in fact supporting old versions is an ongoing non-trivial cost.Office is a huge cash cow for MS, I have been told by people who should know that it is the biggest revenue source for MS, so anything that screws with the upgrade cycle is seen as evil.Of course I was talking bollocks when I said 10%, the current number is far higher.Also VBA crushes the opposition when it comes to tactical spreadsheet applications. It's pathetically easy to see how you could make VBA more suited to the task, but very tough to see what could replace it.I can get a non-programmer to a level where he can do useful stuff in VBA in an hour. On the other hand, even some professional programmers suffer real pain when fighting VSTO's assemblies, awkward security issues, and it's overall feel of being more like a Ouija board communicating with another dimension, rather than a part of Excel. Java is worse.So VBA ain't gonna die any time soon. After C++, it is the most common language in our line of work, I hear some claim it is more common, and cannot say with 100% confidence that it is wrong.