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VBA in Office 12

Could anyone show some information about VBA in Office 12? Does Microsoft support VBA in Office 12? Are there have any new features or improvements?

Thank you in advance!

[197 byte] By [clxowen] at [2007-12-22]

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# 1

I believe that Visual Studio Tools for Office will be replacing VBA in Office 12, but that Microsoft will still support VBA.

Here's a few sites that may be of use:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/vsto/default.aspx

I hope this helps!

-brenda (ISV Buddy Team)

MSISVBuddyTeam at 2007-8-30 >

top of Msdn Tech,Microsoft ISV Community Center Forums,Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)...

# 2

Hi,

I just wanted to clarify some information on my original post. This info is direct from the product team.

We are absolutely supporting VBA in O12.

"We realize that our customers have an enormous investment in VBA solutions. VBA will continue to be supported in Office “12” and beyond, and is a critical part of our Developer offerings."

VSTO, while offering some very cool solution capabilities with Office, is not a replacement for VBA - it is targeted at Professional Developers.

-brenda (ISV Buddy Team)

MSISVBuddyTeam at 2007-8-30 >

# 3

Thank you for your information.

clxowen at 2007-8-30 >

# 4

This is welcome news. Does 'absolutely supporting' include updating the VBA IDE?

JulianLadbury at 2007-8-30 >

# 5

Hi Julian,

While we are investing in our VBA support in O12, the VBA IDE has not been a major area of investment for us this release. That said, what “updating” are you looking for? Is there something specific?

-brenda (ISV Buddy Team)

MSISVBuddyTeam at 2007-8-30 >

# 6

No, nothing specific. Apart maybe from making it work with the Scroll wheel on a wheel mouse. I just have a concern that a lack of development focus on the IDE (as is betrayed by my somewhat trivial example) will mean that in the end the language will be allowed to wither. I have a great deal of investment in it. This is mostly because anyone who has Office has VBA; at present I can guarantee that I can write code for Office and be sure that it will reach the maximum audience. No need for them to have a new .net environment, or a Java Virtual Machine, or any other operating system add-on.

JulianLadbury at 2007-8-30 >

# 7

Well, what we need is: VSTO to support all Office apps, bring the rest up to the level that Word and Excel have (especially Access).

I remember a rumoured "VSA.net" (Visual Studio for Applications) that was to replace VBA in Office . We need that, but we really need an Office version that allows both VBA and VSA.net before the expected death of vba.

I also bemoan the fact that those using VBA are not considered "Professional developers".

SteveConklin at 2007-8-30 >

# 8

An observation:

MS is still supporting XLM in Excel 2003 and reportedly in 2007. I feel reasonably confident that VBA will continue to work for several new releases of Office. This despite the push towards managed code/.net/VSTO.

While Microsoft no longer seems to consider VBA/Workbook jocks "Professional Developers", most companies are not ready for VSTO, and in fact VSTO is overkill for a great many projects.

Someone mentioned scroll wheel support. I think I heard a rumor that it's coming, but I don't remember where I heard that. In any case, I've used this utility with great success:

http://www.gasanov.net/VBScroll.htm

JonPeltier at 2007-8-30 >

# 9

Thanks for the info.

We have plans to move our product over to 64-bit but there isn't an equivalent replacement for VBA for that.

So if VSTO isn't going to replace VBA, would there be a possibility of having a 64-bit VBA available in the near future?

- Vincent

VincentYeap at 2007-8-30 >

# 10

Hi,

Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) is the future direction for application customization. VSTA allows you to program in VB or C# and supports many advanced features like, 64bit, simple integration, Managed Add-in Framework (MAF) for version resiliency, a simplified Visual Studio based redistributable IDE, add-in isolation etc.
VSTA ships with the VS SDK and is currently in CTP Beta. VSTA will ship with Office 12 as part of InfoPath 12. VSTA will RTM with Office 12. Summit Software will be handling support and licensing as they did with VBA.
There is always confusion about VSTO, VBA and VSTA. One way to conceptually think about VSTO and VSTA is that VSTO is an instance of VSTA. So imagine an ISV taking VSTA and integrating it into Office, the result is VSTO. Just as another ISV, AutoCAD for example, could take VSTA and integrate it into their application.

Please check out the VSTA team blog for more information
http://blogs.MSDN.com/vsta/

Paul Stubbs
Program Manager - VSTA
http://blogs.MSDN.com/PStubbs/

PaulStubbs-MSFT at 2007-8-30 >

# 11

Paul,

Thanks for providing the answers. Much appreciated.

Vincent

VincentYeap at 2007-8-30 >

# 12

I am unclear on what this means for our existing Access applications written in VBA.

Will they still fuction the same once we move to Office 12? We are currently using Access 2002.

Are there migration issues or other problems we could expect to see when we make this move?

Thanks for the help.

TerryShowers at 2007-8-30 >

# 13

Per earlier in this thread:

"I just wanted to clarify some information on my original post. This info is direct from the product team.

We are absolutely supporting VBA in O12.

"We realize that our customers have an enormous investment in VBA solutions. VBA will continue to be supported in Office “12” and beyond, and is a critical part of our Developer offerings."

VSTO, while offering some very cool solution capabilities with Office, is not a replacement for VBA - it is targeted at Professional Developers."

From what I've heard from the product team, what you've created in Access 2002 should also work in Access 2007. You can get more details on VBA development for Access on one of these newsgroups:

office.developer.vba
access.macros
access.modulesdaovba

-brenda (ISV Buddy Team)

MSISVBuddyTeam at 2007-8-30 >

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