Any improvements to vba in Excel 2004?

[Steven Sartorius]

Hi,

Subject line kind of says it all. I use Excel 2000 VBA a fair amount in my
job and have noticed that it is a little more full featured than the VBA
version I have with Excel X. Have there been any significant
improvements/changes in the VBA shipping with Excel 2004?

Thanks for any help with this...


Steve

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Subject line kind of says it all. I use Excel 2000 VBA a fair amount in my
job and have noticed that it is a little more full featured than the VBA
version I have with Excel X. Have there been any significant
improvements/changes in the VBA shipping with Excel 2004?

A couple of bugs fixed, mostly. The biggest improvement in XL was the
improved support for Applescript, which took the lion's, the hyena's,
the vulture's, and the ant's share of the development budget.

As I've posted here before, VBA is a dead language walking. No
significant improvement is likely on either the Win or Mac side. WinXL,
either in the next version or the following one, will likely include a
..Net solution, while keeping backward compatibility with VBA 6.3.

The future of Mac automation is, AFAIK, still up in the air. MacBU would
seemingly like everyone to switch to RealBasic and Applescript.
Developing a .Net analog will be expensive and resource consuming, and
so, if implemented at all, probably won't roll until at least one
version after it rolls out in WinOffice.

OTOH, VBA6.3 by itself doesn't have a lot of new features over VBA5. I
use an add-in to implement the major VBA6-only functions (Replace,
Round, Split, Join, etc.) using VBA5. I also use conditional
compilation for my cross-platform applications. I'm working on a web
page that illustrates how to use both, for my site. I'll post here when
I get it done.

 

[Steven Sartorius]

A couple of bugs fixed, mostly. The biggest improvement in XL was the
improved support for Applescript, which took the lion's, the hyena's,
the vulture's, and the ant's share of the development budget.

As I've posted here before, VBA is a dead language walking. No
significant improvement is likely on either the Win or Mac side. WinXL,
either in the next version or the following one, will likely include a
.Net solution, while keeping backward compatibility with VBA 6.3.

The future of Mac automation is, AFAIK, still up in the air. MacBU
would seemingly like everyone to switch to RealBasic and Applescript.
Developing a .Net analog will be expensive and resource consuming, and
so, if implemented at all, probably won't roll until at least one
version after it rolls out in WinOffice.

OTOH, VBA6.3 by itself doesn't have a lot of new features over VBA5. I
use an add-in to implement the major VBA6-only functions (Replace,
Round, Split, Join, etc.) using VBA5. I also use conditional
compilation for my cross-platform applications. I'm working on a web
page that illustrates how to use both, for my site. I'll post here when
I get it done.

Thanks for your informative post and I look forward to seeing your web
page when it's done. The problem I (and presumably) others face is
non-portable code between Windows versions of Excel VBA and the current
Mac version(s). 'Enum', for example, doesn't work on the Mac; nor does
the use of regular expressions -- that library doesn't exist for the
Mac. As far as I can tell there is no easy way to produce cross
platflorm code (without writing extremely basic code on the Windows
side -- no pun intended.....)

Steve