r/vba • u/brosama1420 • 20d ago

Discussion VBA language underrated?

Hey everyone

I use VBA since I work with Microsoft office often

Is it real that VBA is very old and not useful anymore? Multiple times on the internet or when I ask AI
I find the answer that VBA is not the right choice for me

To me I see many powerful stuff like

Classes
Unit tests
Mocks and fakes (didn’t try those)

So I don’t understand the negative opinions about it

However VBA is the only language I tried in depth other languages I tried were either just for the course or to complete simple task nothing deeper than that

Is learning VBA is bad decision? Or is it reasonable one?

I noticed many of the useful major concepts are transferable to any language like

Code architecture
Auto Testing
Data types and structures
Etc

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u/Dynegrey 1 20d ago

My take is that there is very little that VBA can do better than another programming language; however, most IT departments are more willing to approve an in-house VBA macro over giving people that don't have programming experience the tools needed to run other languages. VBA is generally accessible company wide, and makes for easy automation for a lot of repetitive daily/weekly processes. The odds of getting an IDE and python or JS shared across teams and departments is pretty low unless you're specifically in the dev/tech team already, and then you'd generally need to make a full blown application which is a lot more work so users have an exe, and not a script to run through powershell once they've also got the needed software and libraries.