VBA

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “writing VBA in Office was even worse than the squiggles, because it would show a modal error message if the line you'd just written contained a syntax error.”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-24

• “I love the VBA debugger. It is so seamless to step through code - correct in place - continue stepping to be sure the code works”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-05-02

• “used VBA extensively and often got hired because of my automation skills”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-19

• “I wrote a reconciliation tool in VBA in Excel. I scan I all the (mostly thermal-printed) receipts and it matches them to credit card charges.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-23

• “I prefer to do it with VBA code because I find it easier to manage”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-03-06

• “imperative logic in VBA (HTTP calls, database calls, file system, etc.)”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-03-05

• “I did earn some bread with vba as well, and always advocate for efficiency”

  POSITIVE · Hacker News · 2026-02-23

• “I ended up with a finite capacity plan in VBA for an entire factory that took less than five minutes per run”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-02-22

• “the only automations I got working on windowns/office was VBA”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-02-13

• “I saw dozens of date time mistakes in VBA code, but no tests that would catch them”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-02-02

• “VBA was not a security risk here because the distribution of the MDBs was controlled”

  POSITIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-01-27

• “the VBA IDE is a horrible dev experience in pretty much every way and frozen in time”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-12-21

• “countless hours were spent coercing VBA and ODBC to query a DB containing employee info, extracting and resizing their headshot, applying all of this to a template label, queuing a print job, and repeating. It was pretty fun to watch, honestly.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-08-05

• “implemented a few tools (using what my coworkers (who have no programming or IT experience) have available to them: Excel and the VBA on the lab computers) to help them prep inventory lists which they have been doing by hand. Doing it by hand took them 3 hours as a group (and the first shift had to do this every morning), which my tool did in 5 seconds with a single button click. They still use it to this day, about a decade later.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2025-07-26

• “the programming staff insisted wasn't possible. Until I designed it in Access vba.”

  POSITIVE · performance · Reddit · 2025-05-17