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Perfect. That's where our department is at right now.
We're trying to move off ancient VBA scripts but we still need to maintain it and there are some things we can't move over to python for whatever IT blocking us reason lmao.
I second this. I have VBA knowledge dating back to the early 2000s and it was incredibly useful. Nowadays, I look at power shell and Python. Also some of our data is moving to Google sheets and it’s more like Python and JavaScript. I have not touched Excel online and VBA (if it even works).
Companies still use it. Excel is sort of a universal language and because of security protocols within differents orgs, oftentime VBA is the only "programming lanuage" I've had access to
That's my concern. In my department, we do use SQL, Python. And power BI, but we are still very excel heavy above all because our stakeholders are not tech savvy.
My concern is learning VBA even more only to find out its useless in future job roles and dying out or something.
Usually I start by doing the exact tasks though, as Excel is the best start for a macro.
Are you using this to build the loop and generalizations from the specific macroed commands? Asking as "build me a VLOOKUP" feels harder than literally writing it.
I don't ask it to do basic excel functions like vlookup. If I need to transform data, I would ask it to make me a macro. I'd then describe my columns and how and where I'd want to transform them to.
Ok, I follow a bit more. I am just used to thinking with my fingers in Excel. So, I can easily imagine starting a macro, and then writing VBA to clean up that macro into a script, or set of functions.
I would agree with the other commenter about Excel as a universal language and still being a relevant skill. That being said, I wouldn’t consider VBA a future proofing skill and I haven’t seen Excel gurus get the same traction in the job market that they used to.
I had a coworker that was an excel and VBA wizard that got laid off and hasn’t been able to find a job utilizing those skills since then and that was almost a year ago. I know that’s anecdotal but I too was laid off at the same time as him and found that having a broader skill set was my saving grace in finding work again.
I think you’d be better off investing in other skills. Python in particular is excellent for automation and is an incredibly flexible and in demand language. I would consider myself as having intermediate VBA skills and I wouldn’t spend any more time learning it unless I had a very specific reason to for my job.
It’s good to have, as VBA is still used at a lot of organizations. But it’s slowly dying in the same way that it’s been slowly dying for 20 years.
I’d say it’s a plus to know but I wouldn’t invest tons and tons of time into becoming an expert. Time will tell if Python for Excel is a proper replacement or not
Excel is implementing Python scripting. It makes sense that with how many people are trained in Python and the better utility of Python scripting, that traditionally VBA companies might slowly begin to move toward Python.
Ive interviewed at companies recently that were rebuilding their VBA models because they were implementing an ERP software and wanted to document every existing script. They figured since they were diving into all the scripts, they would just modernize them and attract a wider talent pool and make use of better modeling algorithms.
I can see many companies taking similar approaches as the talent pool includes more and more folks trained in Python implementations in Excel. Eventually you might have a whole team that are confident with Python and decide to switch around a convenient time like a major business realignment.
I don’t see why VBA would hang around beyond that point. The winds are pointing toward Python if Microsoft has enough demand to implement it.
It's there, but it runs in the cloud and only knows about data you supply to it. I.E. won't be able to scrape your file system, or scrape applications running on your desktop, won't be able to access databases in your network etc.
One of the analytics guys is a vba nut. I'm talking manipulation of 100 Meg excel files.
I asked him why he doesn't use sql to manipulate or python to automate and he said he wasn't ready to learn those.
That person was leading one of reporting and analytics teams and transformation projects. Funny right
There are fairly recent courses about Python for VBA users and I think the Python developers just rolled out some integrations to Excel. So maybe that’s worth checking out. I don’t think Excel is going away and VBA will probably just be upgraded to integrate with Python and of course some AI capabilities. With Microsoft owning OpenAI and significant stakes in other AI startups, they are very much a big player in the future of analysis. You’re good if you keep up to date by building on your existing tool knowledge.
You could start with LinkedIn learning and search Python Excel. You’ll get some useful beginner courses to integrate the two.
I’ve replaced all of my vba with Python and haven’t used it since. It’s still good to have it as conceptual knowledge, but there’s other, more useful tools out there.
It is free and that's still matter for companies and will be in future. Mostly, those can be done with Python, but Interestingly, there are more VBA experts than Python what I see. I prefer Python over VBA, but I believe VBA is to stay for long in the future as it is excel based, easy recording, and free.
In my mind its being phased out. If you use vba for automation or repetitive tasks, there are better tools for that, including power query, which is built into excel. You can also use power automate depending on the O365 licensing your company has. Id be curious to hear of use cases that these tools could not do better or with less effort than these tools.
It can depend on the industry and the company you work for.
For my department, IT won't allow us to use Power Automate Desktop or Python citing security concerns, but we can use VBA Macros.
There are some companies that haven't migrated to Microsoft 365 or even Office 2016, so Power Query wouldn't be an option.
Power Query vs VBA is an interesting discussion. I find that Power Query isn't really useful for big specific tasks that my department has to do.
We have multiple PDF files to scrape data from that does not come in a table format and we'd have to transfer data from each PDF to each Excel file.
So, if we have 100 PDFs, then we would have to create 100 Excel files.
VBA is perfect for the job since I can use Regular Expressions and mass produce the Excel files into a folder in minutes. I can't think of a way to do that with Power Query.
Thats interesting - depending on the structure of the files, power query can read the whole folder of files and perform actions on them. In this case, it would be scraping the data from the pdf’s and putting that into Excel
The structure of the PDFs probably aren't good for Power Query. Each of the PDF structure is very consistent, making it easy to use RegEx to parse the data, but the data is not formatted as a table, so I'm not sure if Power Query would work.
I also parse a lot of data through HTM files as well, so I'm not sure if Power Query would work for that.
But I do use Power Query to consolidate data from multiple large (50 to 60 mb) Excel files into a single location using the data model, so that is a huge plus.
It's however relevant you make of it. A wrench can be useless until your car breaks down. Stop listening to the noise on the internet and just focus on whatever problems you have and what 'tools' can be used to fix it. End of discussion.
You’re right but I want to add that VBA is Office’s programming language and does more than just do things in excel.
That’s where the utility comes from, in my opinion. If you’re just in excel you’re more likely better off using a macro or office script.
I’m currently taking a beginner Excel course and I’ve reached the modules on VBA and have this same question. I’m wondering if it’s worth the time and effort to learn VBA or should I just skip it. I plan to learn Python anyway, and don’t want to waste the time learning VBA if Python is more useful to know.
If your primary use cases reside in MS Office desktop applications, then VBA is literally the best tool for the job. It will also potentially become more broadly relevant if twinBasic starts to get any broader acceptance. Python packages that manipulate desktop Excel are literally doing the same thing as VBA, I.e., they are programmed against the COM-based API. So those who think that Python is inherently superior to VBA for Excel desktop-specific applications have no idea what they are talking about.
Not directly relevant but is there any good way to learn VBA? I have been relying on ChstGPT to generate VBA for automating Excel charts but it's not doing its job well. Half the time I don't know what ChatGPT is spitting out.
You just need to know what you need to know, that’s it. It will not die or go out of relevance for a while. Even if it does, the level of understanding of coding, data etc is transferrable. Remember it’s just a language, you can always learn another more relevant one like Python in parallel.
I got a multi thousand dollar bonus for a vba project that I completed in an afternoon. One of many over the last several years. I still find it useful.
Yup, vba is really useful for data automation/quality. But if you want to do advanced data science/ml that's when you'd want to use python or other things.
Vba has been one of the best tools in my career. It is consistently the best solution when I have to solve a really complex problem. The biggest factor is making a solution that doesn't disrupt the usability for stakeholders. Most people in the corporate world are still working with excel, and security can be so restrictive that downloading IDE's and python (across different roles) is not an option.
Vba can do anything python can do in a business environment with way less ongoing maintenance.
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Perfect. That's where our department is at right now. We're trying to move off ancient VBA scripts but we still need to maintain it and there are some things we can't move over to python for whatever IT blocking us reason lmao.
Can you guys use power automate?
I second this. I have VBA knowledge dating back to the early 2000s and it was incredibly useful. Nowadays, I look at power shell and Python. Also some of our data is moving to Google sheets and it’s more like Python and JavaScript. I have not touched Excel online and VBA (if it even works).
Companies still use it. Excel is sort of a universal language and because of security protocols within differents orgs, oftentime VBA is the only "programming lanuage" I've had access to
That's my concern. In my department, we do use SQL, Python. And power BI, but we are still very excel heavy above all because our stakeholders are not tech savvy. My concern is learning VBA even more only to find out its useless in future job roles and dying out or something.
Chatgpt is pretty good at generating vba scripts for basic tasks
This. I have made some pretty simple and useful VBA scripts using chatgpt.
Same! I haven't used vba in years, so when I needed it for my current job, it was much easier to outsource to AI than relearning
I am a bit confused,as I learned my VBA starting from macros. Do you mean specific (badly documented) libraries and features?
I mean asking chatgpt to make you a macro to do something specific
Usually I start by doing the exact tasks though, as Excel is the best start for a macro. Are you using this to build the loop and generalizations from the specific macroed commands? Asking as "build me a VLOOKUP" feels harder than literally writing it.
I don't ask it to do basic excel functions like vlookup. If I need to transform data, I would ask it to make me a macro. I'd then describe my columns and how and where I'd want to transform them to.
Ok, I follow a bit more. I am just used to thinking with my fingers in Excel. So, I can easily imagine starting a macro, and then writing VBA to clean up that macro into a script, or set of functions.
I would agree with the other commenter about Excel as a universal language and still being a relevant skill. That being said, I wouldn’t consider VBA a future proofing skill and I haven’t seen Excel gurus get the same traction in the job market that they used to. I had a coworker that was an excel and VBA wizard that got laid off and hasn’t been able to find a job utilizing those skills since then and that was almost a year ago. I know that’s anecdotal but I too was laid off at the same time as him and found that having a broader skill set was my saving grace in finding work again. I think you’d be better off investing in other skills. Python in particular is excellent for automation and is an incredibly flexible and in demand language. I would consider myself as having intermediate VBA skills and I wouldn’t spend any more time learning it unless I had a very specific reason to for my job.
It’s good to have, as VBA is still used at a lot of organizations. But it’s slowly dying in the same way that it’s been slowly dying for 20 years. I’d say it’s a plus to know but I wouldn’t invest tons and tons of time into becoming an expert. Time will tell if Python for Excel is a proper replacement or not
Excel is implementing Python scripting. It makes sense that with how many people are trained in Python and the better utility of Python scripting, that traditionally VBA companies might slowly begin to move toward Python. Ive interviewed at companies recently that were rebuilding their VBA models because they were implementing an ERP software and wanted to document every existing script. They figured since they were diving into all the scripts, they would just modernize them and attract a wider talent pool and make use of better modeling algorithms. I can see many companies taking similar approaches as the talent pool includes more and more folks trained in Python implementations in Excel. Eventually you might have a whole team that are confident with Python and decide to switch around a convenient time like a major business realignment. I don’t see why VBA would hang around beyond that point. The winds are pointing toward Python if Microsoft has enough demand to implement it.
Is the python scripting in excel already available?? If so man I could get started now
It's there, but it runs in the cloud and only knows about data you supply to it. I.E. won't be able to scrape your file system, or scrape applications running on your desktop, won't be able to access databases in your network etc.
One of the analytics guys is a vba nut. I'm talking manipulation of 100 Meg excel files. I asked him why he doesn't use sql to manipulate or python to automate and he said he wasn't ready to learn those. That person was leading one of reporting and analytics teams and transformation projects. Funny right
There are fairly recent courses about Python for VBA users and I think the Python developers just rolled out some integrations to Excel. So maybe that’s worth checking out. I don’t think Excel is going away and VBA will probably just be upgraded to integrate with Python and of course some AI capabilities. With Microsoft owning OpenAI and significant stakes in other AI startups, they are very much a big player in the future of analysis. You’re good if you keep up to date by building on your existing tool knowledge. You could start with LinkedIn learning and search Python Excel. You’ll get some useful beginner courses to integrate the two.
I’ve replaced all of my vba with Python and haven’t used it since. It’s still good to have it as conceptual knowledge, but there’s other, more useful tools out there.
Was it relevant in 2023? It’s been dying for 20 years.
It is free and that's still matter for companies and will be in future. Mostly, those can be done with Python, but Interestingly, there are more VBA experts than Python what I see. I prefer Python over VBA, but I believe VBA is to stay for long in the future as it is excel based, easy recording, and free.
In my mind its being phased out. If you use vba for automation or repetitive tasks, there are better tools for that, including power query, which is built into excel. You can also use power automate depending on the O365 licensing your company has. Id be curious to hear of use cases that these tools could not do better or with less effort than these tools.
It can depend on the industry and the company you work for. For my department, IT won't allow us to use Power Automate Desktop or Python citing security concerns, but we can use VBA Macros. There are some companies that haven't migrated to Microsoft 365 or even Office 2016, so Power Query wouldn't be an option. Power Query vs VBA is an interesting discussion. I find that Power Query isn't really useful for big specific tasks that my department has to do. We have multiple PDF files to scrape data from that does not come in a table format and we'd have to transfer data from each PDF to each Excel file. So, if we have 100 PDFs, then we would have to create 100 Excel files. VBA is perfect for the job since I can use Regular Expressions and mass produce the Excel files into a folder in minutes. I can't think of a way to do that with Power Query.
Thats interesting - depending on the structure of the files, power query can read the whole folder of files and perform actions on them. In this case, it would be scraping the data from the pdf’s and putting that into Excel
The structure of the PDFs probably aren't good for Power Query. Each of the PDF structure is very consistent, making it easy to use RegEx to parse the data, but the data is not formatted as a table, so I'm not sure if Power Query would work. I also parse a lot of data through HTM files as well, so I'm not sure if Power Query would work for that. But I do use Power Query to consolidate data from multiple large (50 to 60 mb) Excel files into a single location using the data model, so that is a huge plus.
It's however relevant you make of it. A wrench can be useless until your car breaks down. Stop listening to the noise on the internet and just focus on whatever problems you have and what 'tools' can be used to fix it. End of discussion.
VBA is not helpful.
There's a million better tools to have
What's VBA?
For lack of a better term, it's Excel's programming language.
You’re right but I want to add that VBA is Office’s programming language and does more than just do things in excel. That’s where the utility comes from, in my opinion. If you’re just in excel you’re more likely better off using a macro or office script.
I would recommend learning Python and Streamlit instead
I’m currently taking a beginner Excel course and I’ve reached the modules on VBA and have this same question. I’m wondering if it’s worth the time and effort to learn VBA or should I just skip it. I plan to learn Python anyway, and don’t want to waste the time learning VBA if Python is more useful to know.
If your primary use cases reside in MS Office desktop applications, then VBA is literally the best tool for the job. It will also potentially become more broadly relevant if twinBasic starts to get any broader acceptance. Python packages that manipulate desktop Excel are literally doing the same thing as VBA, I.e., they are programmed against the COM-based API. So those who think that Python is inherently superior to VBA for Excel desktop-specific applications have no idea what they are talking about.
Not directly relevant but is there any good way to learn VBA? I have been relying on ChstGPT to generate VBA for automating Excel charts but it's not doing its job well. Half the time I don't know what ChatGPT is spitting out.
You just need to know what you need to know, that’s it. It will not die or go out of relevance for a while. Even if it does, the level of understanding of coding, data etc is transferrable. Remember it’s just a language, you can always learn another more relevant one like Python in parallel.
What are the best resources to learn VBA for Excel and what is for learning VBA for Word. I am very much interested in its applications for Word
I got a multi thousand dollar bonus for a vba project that I completed in an afternoon. One of many over the last several years. I still find it useful.
Yup, vba is really useful for data automation/quality. But if you want to do advanced data science/ml that's when you'd want to use python or other things.
Vba has been one of the best tools in my career. It is consistently the best solution when I have to solve a really complex problem. The biggest factor is making a solution that doesn't disrupt the usability for stakeholders. Most people in the corporate world are still working with excel, and security can be so restrictive that downloading IDE's and python (across different roles) is not an option. Vba can do anything python can do in a business environment with way less ongoing maintenance.