Future of VBA?

[ptmuldoon]

Apologies if this should be in the off-topic section of the forums, thus please move if feel appropriate.

I have been having discussions with my Company's IT department on the future of Macros and the direction of MSOffice in general. And in now starting my own research I see that VBA is slowing becoming a legacy deprecated programming language in Excel and Office, and is being replaced via Javascript and Office Addins (formerly Webapps?)

So, now after spending 3+ years in getting down the basics and some confidence in VBA find myself thinking I need to start looking into learning and possibly converting various (alot) code from VBA to Javascript and building an Addin for Office 2016 and beyond.

Is this something that should start being discussed here on the forums? And possibly even need to have its own new section in learning and asking questions on it?

Any thoughts on the future of VBA? How much longer do think we have until VBA and the VB Editor is no longer included in new releases?

Thanks
PT

[alansidman]

One thought on this: http://analystcave.com/vba-dead-whats-future-vba/

[xlnitwit]

Considering that Excel still supports the Excel4 macro commands, I would confidently predict that VBA will not be removed in the next 10 years at least. Far too many companies have far too much time and money invested in it for that to be anything besides commercial suicide. Furthermore, from various discussions I have seen, the JavaScript API still has a very, very long way to go before it could be considered a replacement for VBA.

[AB33]

ptmuldoon,
You are not the only to feel "What I have invested( Or wasted) on "?.
Yes, VBA became a legacy-well- before I had started learning it, but If I knew I would not have wasted my time. In fact, MS had put all its eggs on C#. VBA is an offshoot of VBA6, which was dead long time ago. VB Dot Net is still actively supported by MS. MS is now heading towards Web Office workers applications". Google is encroaching in to what once was MS' sole territory. If you are not in cloud, you are out in a cold. MS had started the web project over 6 years ago and is still in work- in-progress. MS office applications will remain the dominant desktop applications in the next decade, but nothing is predictable as far as technology is concerned. Few programming languages are coming out every week and established and once dominant players are under threat.

What does Legacy mean? Many languages like, Cobol, which was developed in 60's still used by some companies, but have been declared dead over two decades ago. So, we should take this notion of "Legacy" with a pinch of salt". MS office applications have been around since mid 80's and millions of companies and individuals have vested interest in them. So, I do not think MS will suddenly switch them off and so long as office is around, we will have VBA.

JavaScript has became the king of front-end applications and there is not competitor to it. So, if you want to be present in the web, there is no other language but JavaScript. Lots of Libraries and frameworks added the icing in the cake for JavaScript. JQuery, Angular (Google's project), React and JSON and etc.

[ptmuldoon]

I agree with everything said here as well. I feel VBA is going to be hear for a very very long time. Although I will be subject to the 'higher up' in my Firm and likely various IT restrictions down the road.

So I'm trying to learn what I can today and installed VS Studio and found some sample on how to add to the Ribbon, But I can't get it work!

If anyone is curious, can you give the samples here from git hub I try? I have side loaded them here, yet can get anything in the Menu and Ribbon to show in either Word or Excel.

https://github.com/OfficeDev/Office-...mmands-Samples