VBA vs. VB

[alcorjr]

Hi guys, in other posts I have exposed what an enthusiast of Excel and VBA I am.
With your help I have developped several complex applications, which are in use at my job, saving time and gaining efficiency.

Lately, some fellow workers, "career" programmers, have been telling me that the applications are great, BUT....what a pity they are written in VBA, with Excel being so unstable and all, that I should switch to VB 6, BLAH,BLAH,BLAH.
I'm more than content with VBA, and have experienced a few problems of stability myself, but nothing serious has been lost.
Also I'm more than willing to learn VB, if only for my own advancement, but ,from what I've learnt from VB so far, I thing Excel is much more flexible and straight-forward

What do you think...Is VBA better suited than VB to develop administrative applications, or is VB better in all cases ?

Would I be able to do in VB the same kind of applications that I have in VBA (accrued vacation time database, vacations pay-check calculations,etc. )

Any and all opinions are welcome

 

[alcorjr]

No opinions whatsoever ??

 

[zilpher]

Hi alcorjr

I'm not sure what context your fellow workers are using when saying that VBA is more unstable than VB6, but I tend to disagree. Applications are as stable as you make them, unless you start trying to multi thread VB or something largely unnecessary or inappropriate for the language. VBA will come unstable if you try to do something with it that it isn't capable of doing.

In my experience (started as a VBA'er, moved on to VB6, C++, PHP and settled on VB.Net, write distributed applications for the biggest motoring organisation in the UK), developers like to look down on others by grouping them into language groups, C++ developers are snooty about VB developers, VB developers are snooty about VBA and everyone laughs at the Java guys Hopefully .Net levels the field for the MS guys, hence my decision to stick with VB.Net, it's not crippled in comparison to C#

Your move to VB6 wouldn't be that hard. The biggest hurdle I had was understanding the IDE and the concept of writing EXE's, and boy, did I miss the worksheet and application objects, but get past that and VBA and VB6 are very similar (not identical but sufficiently similar). Sure there's more complicated aspects to the IDE, but hey, learn to walk first.

Yes you can write the sort of applications you mention, but it's more about selecting the right tool to complete the job, if Excel is the right thing, then go for it. I know developers with qualifications as long as your arm, but they are terrible at turning requirements into a working application, with minimal defects. It might be ultra efficient but if it don't work it ain't worth a thing. The worst developer I have known was a C++ developer, terrible, but he still looked down his nose at me because I only used VB6 back then.

A typical example is in my role, I received a spreadsheet with 12000 rows of data in it that need to be added to an Oracle database. Uber Computer Science guy starts exporting the file as comma delimited text and writing parsing routines in a C++ console app to transforn the data into an sql script. Meanwhile, I've written 25 lines of VBA and finished the import before he's finished his design.

My advice would be, move to VB6 where appropriate, never forget your roots and enjoy development. Try .Net it's great but to really appreciate it, you have to write 400 lines of VB6 code then implement the same functionality in two lines with .Net :D I'm pleased I made the switch.

HTH