this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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I have seen critical enterprise applications run in VBA in excel. Removing VBA would cause global economic ruin. I'm pretty sure that's the unspoken backstory for the Fallout series.
Can confirm. Worked at several billion dollar corps that would collapse without vba.
Can confirm as well. It's wild
Another Sys Admin confirming that yes, the finance department runs nearly entirely on VBA. They would be lost without it.
I want to see that happen.
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.
Also remember, strictly speaking, IT is not software development. IT is networking and hardware management.
Software development (and scoff all you want, but VBS/VBA are programming languages/frameworks used to develop software applications) is its own separate beast.
They MAY report to the CIO. They could also report to the COO. Fuck, software development/process automation/business intelligence can have a director reporting directly to the CEO.
In general, software development and information technology are not the same and don't reside in the same chain of command.
Strictly speaking, information technology encompasses software dev as a subfield. Practically, a large software development at a company has very different needs and strategic goals than what people usually understand as the "IT guys" so what you mentioned. So they are set up accordingly in an organisation.
With some of my smaller clients, the CIO is the same as the CTO and the same as the IT Director. There, IT is developers, too.
IT isn't developers. What is really needed is a developer on your team, or somebody who at least knows how to lead the effort. I've been that guy.
We do have developers on our team. They write Excel macros :). I work in data integration, so it isn't as simple as building a more robust tool. We still need infrastructure support or our tool doesn't do anything.
Please at least tell me that the Macros are just a front end for ODBC connections to actual SQL servers for ETL functions, and it ALL isn't stored only in excel...?
It's not that bad, the macros are just front end apps. Our data is housed in a real, enterprise class database.
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...
That type of bonus is usually called a “bone us”
WTF, seriously? VBA feels more like a scripting addon (which I suppose it is), not something to build wholesale CRITICAL programs with.
They didn't start out building an enterprise critical application, they normally started as some little script someone built to make their work faster. Then they shared it with the team, built more features, and 20 years later hundreds of staff are using it and if it dissappeared they would be screwed.
Plus the data in them is often the only record of critical data (in their defense, the spreadsheets are typically stored somewhere where the backup process will back them up).
It's me, I'm that guy lmfao, although by the time I left it was considerably more complex. I have "real" languages under my belt, but it was a banking environment and VBA was all I had (Which even that kinda surprised me lol).
I was hooked into the windows API and doing all sorts of stuff and yea before leaving I did distribute stand alone parts of it (The full system was a beast, 90% of my job was automated towards the end lololol)
Honestly, VBA is more powerful than people give it credit for, just a PITA to implement some things
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution
At my old job, we had a VBA script that would:
Thirty page custom reports per client within 2 minutes (when nothing broke). It allows you to interact and automate across the Microsoft Suite. That is one of the reasons why it is indispensable to many companies
This is definitely giving me flashbacks during my time in the corporate world. There was one report that was replete with copy and pasting, the poor lady who used to do it apparently had to pull all-nighters doing it. I rebuilt everything in Access using some SQL and the new process only took 15 minutes to run.
The things done in excel might not be critical per-se, but macros are used and abused a lot and many companies can be affected by their dependence on workflows refined over the years.
Haha, don't I know it. I've had to work with some of them in a past life. Messy and also very scary at how they underpin million dollar decisions.
This is true for software in general.
The same description can be given to workshops (and you know they already exist) that do the same stuff with ChatGPT.
It's a scripting language.
A solid, verbose, diverse scripting language that gives you impressive control over Windows environments.
If some people are delivering malware or phishing, that sucks, but it doesn't negate the languages merit.
It would be the same as ceasing production of spray paint because of taggers.
The ends don't justify the means.
They have an alternative called Powershell that can do what VBS does and more. Its a modern and actively developed scripting language that Microsoft undoubtedly expect you to port your code into, that is if you cant use a cloud product first wink wink
It will be a shit show of course, at least for those orgs that dont block this depreciation outright via whatever method comes out. Still, there is putty to patch the holes.
I suppose Microsoft Access has better options now you can define the steps in macros, but I think it's still needed for many of the more fiddly bits.
Yup, I was the guy who wrote vba script to calculate performance of network mobile and export chart to ppt files.
Many critcal engineering and financial calculations rely on vba scripts
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.
Your story is pretty typical in my experience. No one hires a dev team to build a VBA tool (except the occasional MS Access tool). It's normally someone doing the work who works out how to do a basic macro to make it quicker, and it grows from there.
Indeed. In my case, I fought through managerial malaise and turned the entire process on its ear. But even after the approach proved its worth, they refused to put a dev resource on it. It became my problem 24/7.
Remember kids, being good at something outside of your job description means it's now your job. If the boss refuses to compensate you for it, slap it on your resume and find someone who will.
Until it's a cornerstone of the corporation....
MS: You have until (now +2 years) to phase out VBA.
Enterprise: panic noises
Nah. They'll just sit on their hands for two years and then panic.
And then MS will issue a limited extension.
An business still won't be ready.
Modern auth on email is still causing problems for a lot of places.
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#.
Well it's gotta be done some time... otherwise we end up with another version of COBOL.
We're already there, I don't see VBA being phased out of accounting or finance for at least a decade and I'm not even sure then.
Or how about this... we use what works and stop throwing the world into chaos every 4 years so Microsoft can sell their next 50k/year enterprise application.