Joshua Ross

Excel Macros Joshua Ross

The question on everyone's mind will be, what is the future of Excel and VBA macros in this fast-changing world of technology? Well, rest assured that Excel VBA macros will be here until you are retired. Microsoft is aware that there are millions of organizations out there that depend on millions of macros made via Excel. They might have changed to other languages but those VBA macros will work for them no matter, for many decades to come on the PC and the Mac. The reason for this confidence is that Microsoft still supports Excel 4 macros after 20 years since they became functionally outdated. Excel 4 comes with a primitive macro language which was introduced in August 1992 but was taken out of action by VBA in the next version Excel 5 in June 1994. Excel 4 was not used by many people for programming because it was not very user-friendly. But those programs still ran in Excel 2016 as Microsoft knew that many companies still depended on them. Microsoft has now decided that VBA is not to be extended to a platform that already does not have it. Therefore there will not be any macros for the iPhone, iPad or Android devices. Rather they are developing a macro language which is based on JavaScript and it is to be extended to Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Excel Online. You may start building macros by using JavaScript even now but it will not be fun as they still do not have a macro recorder, objects, methods, and properties. It is still incomplete and evolving with a syntax that is not user-friendly and less readable than VBA. Another problem is that JavaScript does not support 2D arrays. You need to use arrays of arrays instead. This language runs asynchronously, therefore, you will have to design the code yourself. And it is slow but, if you are looking for a macro to run on the iPad, this is the path to take going forward. Grab this book today and enrich your Excel Macros expertise!