Future of VBA support on Mac

[Jason Morse]

Just looking for opinions from some of the power-users in this forum...

Over the past 5 years, my co-workers and I have developed/maintained a
number of internal tools for our company using Excel/VBA on a Mac.
Since we have both Macs and PCs, this has been a great development
platform for us.

Recently, I've been hearing grumblings from my management that our
Excel/VBA tools are a liability because MS probably won't support VBA
for too much longer. So we need to start looking for ways to replace
them sooner rather than later (which means moving away from Excel entirely).

I've read in these threads that VBA is a dead language -- that on the
Windows side MS is going to .NET and that for Mac they seem to be
pushing Applescript. (And if the directions are different for Mac/PC,
that doesn't help me at all.)

But does anyone really think that VBA won't be supported in the somewhat
near future (say, XL2008 or XL2009) ? Even the old Excel macros (XLM)
still seem to be supported in XL2004, and that hasn't been the preferred
macro language for close to 10 years, right?

-Jason

 

[JE McGimpsey]

But does anyone really think that VBA won't be supported in the somewhat
near future (say, XL2008 or XL2009) ? Even the old Excel macros (XLM)
still seem to be supported in XL2004, and that hasn't been the preferred
macro language for close to 10 years, right?

My opinion:

Nobody knows for sure but MS, but I'd be *very* surprised if support for
the existing levels of VBA (e.g., 6.3 on Windows, 5.0 on Mac) were
discontinued for *at least* another three versions of Office.

My references to VBA being a dead language walking referred to future
development and extension of the object models. Existing applications
will continue to work for the foreseeable future.

As you point out with XL4M, there are just too many installed VBA
applications that would prevent MS from discontinuing legacy support.
Since MS doesn't get revenue unless people upgrade, VBA support will be
available until the number of customers using VBA can no longer support
the cost of retaining VBA in Office. That will be a long time from now...