Technology

It'll only run on cloud. Their employer would probably block that too.

Afaik the python is ran on Microsoft servers, so not exactly a perfect solution. I doubt it will run offline at all

Wouldn't it face the exact same security issues as VBA, with drive-by installs of obfuscated malware and executions of arbitrary code?

It is their own Adobe Flash

No, that was Silverlight. VBS is MS's JS.

Can confirm. Worked at several billion dollar corps that would collapse without vba.

Another confirmation here. At my previous job, I was they guy who built Access databases and wrote VBA code. While not ideal, it was a very small business (less than 10 employees) and it was fit for purpose.

When I got a new job at a company with almost 3,000 employees, I was like, "Finally, I'll be working somewhere that has proper IT resources." Ha! I soon find out that my department runs critical business infrastructure with Excel macros. And we have a proper IT department.

As everyone has already said, if IT resources are in short supply (or the wait is too long, or building projects with IT support is a PITA), then people will build systems with the tools they have at hand. And that's often MS Office.

My job is literally to keep a NASDAQ company afloat on process automation written mostly in VBA to make up for the sweeping layoffs that were made to keep the CEOs bonuses fat...

WTF, seriously? VBA feels more like a scripting addon (which I suppose it is), not something to build wholesale CRITICAL programs with.

I have seen critical enterprise applications run in VBA in excel.

I wrote one of them. It replaced periodically writing down application outputs on paper and sounding the alarm if something went pear-shaped. It wasn't my job to develop software but I didn't want hand cramps to be my job, either. I had vague ideas about how to do what I wanted to do with Excel so I poked at it and googled until it worked. More than a decade later, I'm no longer there but that freakin spreadsheet is still running 24/7, being proudly showed off during tours of the facility.

I will cackle if MS ever pulls the plug on VBA.

MS: You have until (now +2 years) to phase out VBA.

Enterprise: panic noises

I've worked for a major international company and I was for a while the only maintainer of a shitty request form in an excel file, sent worldwide to hundreds of people. As they wanted more and more specific functions the stuff grew to thousands of unholy VBA code lines and a huge hidden sheet of data.

That thing even had a fully custom language switch function for all dozens of field labels and their possible values.

I kinda hope they're still using it (that wouldn't surprise me) and that their whole workflow will crash and burn when Microsoft finally kills VBA.

Enterprise will cause a boom in hiring VBA devs to migrate legacy apps to other programming languages, then hear Microsoft will extend support for a few more years, then fire all those VBA devs again. If Microsoft had some wits, they'd create easy tools to migrate VBA to C#.

Yup that's normal because VBA is single-threaded, doesn't take advantage of vector instructions and even its interpreter is slow. So when someone writes numerical code in VBA working in single precision, and assuming they have an 8 core CPU with AVX2, they're using only 1/64-th of their CPU's processing power. On the other hand with Python, while it's still interpreted, the interpreter is much faster on its own, and you have modules like numpy that use precompiled routines that take advantage of vector instructions (and possibly multiple cores).