It's as though there were a point long before July 2007 where Microsoft gave up on the idea of COM-based extensibility, leaving the developers of the Office apps to plan for the likelihood of macros blowing up in their users' faces. Microsoft officially opened all its principal Office components to VBA extensibility, although writing a VBA module around Outlook has always proven to be as impossible as wrapping duct tape around an active chipper-shredder.Įven to this day, a VBA module written around PowerPoint for Office 2007 can easily take down the entire application, though testing shows that quite a bit of attention has been paid in more recent editions to making sure presentation data doesn't get lost in the process. Both those libraries and the COM components rely on local System Registry functionality that cannot be reproduced in a Web-only environment.īy far the majority of VBA 'macros' (or, as native developers refer to them, 'modules') have been produced for Word and Excel, though even today, many Excel macros used in the field follow the 'macro sheet,' cell-by-cell instruction syntax originally inspired by Lotus 1-2-3.

VBA is a component built squarely around the Component Object Model, and Microsoft's first methodology for making applications' functionality addressable through type libraries. The fact that VBA will be present in the next Office for Windows edition should subsequently put to rest rumors floating around for the past several months that Microsoft will announce, or has already announced, it will discontinue distributing Office as installable software and will adopt an all-online model instead. We understand that VBA is a critical capability for large numbers of our customers accordingly, there is no plan to remove VBA from future versions of Excel.' 'While it's true that VBA isn't supported in the latest version of Office for the Mac and the VBA licensing program did close to new customers last year,' Chirilov wrote, 'we have no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows.

Instead, Microsoft is steering clients toward adopting Visual Studio Tools for Applications.Įxcel team developer Joseph Chirilov echoed the same sentiment. The confusion may have arisen from Microsoft's decision last July to discontinue new licenses of VBA to new partners seeking to build a functional language into their applications.

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