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Comment by uxp8u61q | Hacker News Reader

Because there was no good alternative until recently. The future is with the new "add-ins" model: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/overvie... Say what you will about typescript, but at least it's better than VBA.

My main issue is that unlike VBA, I can't program it from right there in Excel. Sometimes I don't want to start up a full-fledged add-in project that's meant to be reused. I just want to run a quick-and-dirty script once to fix something right now. I discovered Script Lab (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/overvie...) while writing this, so maybe that'd help.

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> My main issue is that unlike VBA, I can't program it from right there in Excel.

Yeah, that's pretty much a deal-breaker. On top of the obvious thing: can "add-ins" be installed by unprivileged users, without involving the IT department? Can they be embedded in the spreadsheets? A "no" to the former is a real deal-breaker, but a "no" to the latter also hurts adoption. Nice thing about Macros and VBA is that, security settings notwithstanding, every instance of Excel is capable of running them out-of-the-box, without making the user install anything extra.

EDIT: I did not see the script-lab mention at the end of your comment.

Microsoft Script-lab will allow you to do just that. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/script-lab/

The other issue: it is not trivial to share an addin to end users. You need to publish it to marketplace or sharepoint. Sideloading requires SMB server and GPO. However there is an option that is not mentioned anywhere: it is possible to embed it in a document and it will install when it is open for the first time (after user confirmation).

JS Add-ins are way limited than VSTO Add-ins. With the former you are limited to a side panel and add buttons to a specific section in the ribbon while with the VSTO you can even customize views with region forms.

Good if all you do is display a fancy UI for some data entry or visualisation, but OfficeJS can't do half the things VBA can do unfortunately. If only the addin system had FFI. I'd switch forever.

Edit: Another big issue with OfficeJS is you need to be able to host a web server. That's not usually something most end users have access to...

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