I have squarely entered my old man yells at cloud stage of life, so new things don’t come as easy to me as they used to.
A coworker told me they had some excel exhibits created with buttons from something called a “script” in excel. This term was new to me, but sure enough , there in the ribbon is the automate→ scripts. But i have never used scripts, i pretty much just used recorded VBA macros and keyboard shortcuts.
What’s so special about “scripts” ? are they the future? If there was a young upstart in your industry, which would you recommend they learn, scripts, or VBA?
It looks like scripts are better suited if you are working with something that needs to be run on the network level but VBA is better for self-contained applications.
It’s my understanding that Microsoft hasn’t said it’s killing off VBA but that it is shifting its focus away from VBA. Office Scripts are written in TypeScript/JavaScript, which is a more broadly used language than VBA.
If I were starting now, I would probably focus on Excel Scripts rather than Excel VBA, but I haven’t researched the topic much. Full disclosure, I have never written an Excel Script and have only written macros in Excel VBA. I have written some macros in Google Sheets (JavaScript) though.
I think Microsoft wants to kill off VBA in Office. However, at least for the desktop version of Excel, there are too many production spreadsheets out there that use VBA for it to go away anytime soon.
By all means, it’s probably a good idea to learn “the new way” to do things in Excel…but VBA knowledge will continue to be useful for a few more years at least.