So I came to read on Wikipedia: As of July 1, 2007, Microsoft no longer offers VBA distribution licenses to new customers. So, what does it imply for finance world? Will the industry not work with VBA anymore because of Microsoft's whim to impose .Net on every computing soul?From my experience working with some mechanical engineering software tools which was abandoned by the originator in favor of something more commercial, it seems it would be very onerous to continue working with VBA. Is .Net in?

VB6 has managed to stay alive despite MS trying to kill it - VBA will only start to decline when MS replace it in Excel

haven't we already moved past the VBA age ?One just needs to glance at the number of books with code in VBA as compared to MATLAB.

MATLAB has many users that use it very cheaply or for free but few that are prepared to buy expensive licences

Wherever I go, I can always count on having VBA available to me where I can do simple database calls, functions, etc.. This is without having to go to someone in IT to justify why I need so-and-so piece of software (particularly an expensive one like MATLAB). I agree w/ spursfan - VBA hangs around until they take it out of Excel..

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.

There is even a new 64-bit version of VBA in the Excel 2010 64-bit version ...

Can Integer handle numbers greater than 32K in 64-bit VBA?

Why ask the question about integer types - just type them as Long

I was perhaps being a little facetious with that question. What I’m curious about is what the issues will be in porting all those spreadsheet apps with COM and COM interop support to 64 bit desktop systems.

Here is an article discussing some of the compatibility issues between 32-bit office and 64-bit office.http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 4).aspxYou will see for instance that there is a new LongLong VBA datatype.The major VBA conversion issue looks to be API calls.Although there is a 64-bit version of Office VBA, there is no 64-bit version of VB6, so any VB6 COM or Automation addins or DLLs will need to be converted to VBA or rewritten for some other language/compiler.