Editor’s note 8/17/2015:
The blog post was updated to reflect the upcoming availability of Skype for Business in 2016.

• Visual Basic Editor Excel 2016
• Open Visual Basic In Excel 2016

Editor’s note 7/28/2015:
We updated this post to reflect that support for Arabic, Hebrew and Thai language documents on iPad and iPhone was delivered on July 23, 2015. The Office apps for iPad and iPhone are now available in the Office App Store in Arab countries, Israel and Thailand.

You can access the VBA environment in Excel 2016 by opening the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications window. First, be sure that the Developer tab is visible in the toolbar in Excel. The Developer tab is the toolbar that has the buttons to open the VBA editor and create Form/ActiveX Controls like buttons, checkboxes, etc. The importance of the Visual Basic Editor and the lack of resources covering the VBE in detail are the main reasons why I decided to write this Excel tutorial. In this post, I cover the following topics. This is a bug in Excel. To fix this, you simply need to update Excel. Click 'Help' > 'Check for Updates', then close Excel. Next, click the 'Check for Updates' button in the Microsoft AutoUpdate window, and select for Excel to update.

Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office Client Applications and Services team.

The response to last week’s release of Office 2016 for Mac has been amazing—thank you to all our customers! The post was one of the most read and shared Office Blog posts this year, receiving hundreds of great comments and questions. We thought it would be helpful to share the top questions and answers with you.

1. Where do I get Office 2016 for Mac?

Office 2016 for Mac is currently only available for Office 365 subscription customers. It will be available via one-time purchase in late September. In the meantime, here are the instructions on how you can get Office 2016 for Mac today:

• Office 365 subscribers—On your Mac, browse to your account page (office.com/myaccount), sign in and follow the installation instructions. If you have Office 365 through your organization, go to portal.office.com/OLS/MySoftware.aspx.
• Non-Office 365 subscribers—Visit office.com/mac to learn about ways to purchase an Office 365 subscription, either for you or your organization.
• Students—You may get Office 2016 for Mac for free or at a substantial discount. You can find out at office.com/student.

2. When will Office 2016 for Mac be available for people and businesses who don’t want a subscription?

For businesses, Volume Licensing customers will be able to download Office 2016 for Mac from their Volume Licensing Service Center in early August.

For consumers, Office 2016 for Mac will become available as a one-time purchase option in late September.

Additionally, MSDN subscribers will also be able to get the new Office for Mac in September.

3. When will the Office 2016 for Mac preview stop working?

We are extending the use of the Office 2016 for Mac preview until the end of October, in large part based on your feedback.

Originally, we planned to let the Office for Mac preview expire on August 9, 2015, 30 days after launch. However, several customers commented that this was before the availability of the one-time purchase version in September, leaving some preview participants without Office 2016 for weeks. As a result of this feedback, we are extending the life of the preview until the end of October. This will give preview participants about one month to move to Office 2016 as a one-time purchase, or over three months for those who want an Office 365 subscription.

4. Can I use Office 2016 for Mac and Office for Mac 2011 on the same Mac?

Yes, you can use them side-by-side on the same Mac. And by the way, here’s how you add the app icons for Office 2016 to the dock.

5. When will OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business for Mac be available?

OneDrive for Business will be available before the end of the year and Skype for Business in 2016. Stay tuned to the Office Blog if you want to participate in the preview of Skype and OneDrive.

6. I have a technical problem. Where do I go?

The best place to start is support.office.com/home/contact. Otherwise you can let us know if there is something you like or don’t like by clicking the “send a smile/frown” right from within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote or Outlook.

7. How can I request a new feature?

Visual Basic Editor Excel 2016

You can submit your feature request on the new suggestion box service for each application: word.uservoice.com, excel.uservoice.com, powerpoint.uservoice.com, outlook.uservoice.com and onenote.uservoice.com.

8. I’m having problems with Outlook connectivity and reliability. What’s happening?

A number of customers reported hangs or crashes in Outlook 2016 for Mac. The Outlook team is aware of these issues and has identified two specific issues along with their root cause. In one, a small subset of customers saw frequent crashes due to some optimization work that the Outlook team was performing. The other involved hangs for customers with multiple IMAP or POP accounts. Fixes for both issues will be released this week, and customers will be automatically notified by Microsoft AutoUpdate.

We’ve also heard the requests for Gmail and iCloud calendar and contacts sync. We’ll be adding these and other feature requests through monthly updates. Stay tuned to the Office Blog for further updates as we finalize our plans here.

9. What are your plans for Visual Basic support?

Existing macros continue to work in Office 2016 for Mac. When accessing local files, you may encounter permission prompts due to Mac OS X sandboxing. We’ve added methods to the object model to allow you to update macros to minimize the number of prompts.

Office 2016 for Mac provides a simplified Visual Basic Editor (VBE) for viewing/debugging existing macros. We recommend that customers develop macros or VB add-ins in Office for Windows and use Office for Mac to debug if needed. We will continue to ensure compatibility of existing macros and make improvements to the IDE. In the future, we will include the new web-based add-in model in Office for Mac products, which work across devices and platforms, giving add-in developers a modern web development experience. These new add-ins are already available in Outlook for Mac today and will come to the rest of Office for Mac over time. They are available today for Office for Windows for Word and Excel on iPad.

10. When will Office 2016 for Mac be available in Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left languages? What about other languages?

We’ve heard your feedback and questions about right-to-left (RTL) language support. We are committed to doing RTL languages for Office for Mac. We are currently working through timing and will communicate our plans when we have a clearer sense of the timeline.

Support for Arabic, Hebrew and Thai language documents on iPad and iPhone was delivered on July 23, 2015. The Office apps for iPad and iPhone are now available in the Office App Store in Arab countries, Israel and Thailand. And we will release additional updates for RTL languages shortly after the iOS 9 release.

More broadly, Office for Mac is currently available in the following 16 languages: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. And Office 2016 for Mac is available in all countries where Office 365 is available except for Turkey. Office for Mac will be available in Turkey in September when the Turkish language version is ready.

Thank you again for the incredible response to Office 2016 for Mac. The team is already hard at work on the first update for Office 365 customers. We’ll share more information soon. Please keep sending us your questions, feedback and suggestions—it’s very helpful as we prioritize the backlog to create the best Office for Mac experience for you!

—Kirk Koenigsbauer

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6, which was declared legacy in 2008, and its associated integrated development environment (IDE). Although pre-.NET Visual Basic is no longer supported or updated by Microsoft, the VBA programming language was upgraded in 2010 with the introduction of Visual Basic for Applications 7 in Microsoft Office applications.^[1]

Visual Basic for Applications enables building user-defined functions (UDFs), automating processes and accessing Windows API and other low-level functionality through dynamic-link libraries (DLLs). It supersedes and expands on the abilities of earlier application-specific macro programming languages such as Word'sWordBASIC. It can be used to control many aspects of the host application, including manipulating user interface features, such as menus and toolbars, and working with custom user forms or dialog boxes.

As its name suggests, VBA is closely related to Visual Basic and uses the Visual Basic Runtime Library. However, VBA code normally can only run within a host application, rather than as a standalone program. VBA can, however, control one application from another using OLE Automation. For example, VBA can automatically create a Microsoft Word report from Microsoft Excel data that Excel collects automatically from polled sensors. VBA can use, but not create, ActiveX/COM DLLs, and later versions add support for class modules.

VBA is built into most Microsoft Office applications, including Office for Mac OS X (except version 2008), and other Microsoft applications, including Microsoft MapPoint and Microsoft Visio. VBA is also implemented, at least partially, in applications published by companies other than Microsoft, including ArcGIS, AutoCAD, CorelDraw, LibreOffice, Reflection,^[2]SolidWorks,^[3] and WordPerfect.

Design[edit]

Code written in VBA is compiled^[4] to Microsoft P-Code (pseudo-code), a proprietary intermediate language, which the host applications (Access, Excel, Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint) store as a separate stream in COM Structured Storage files (e.g., .doc or .xls) independent of the document streams. The intermediate code is then executed^[4] by a virtual machine (hosted by the host application). Despite its resemblance to many old BASIC dialects (particularly Microsoft BASIC, from which it is indirectly derived), VBA is incompatible with any of them except Visual Basic, where source code of VBA modules and classes can be directly imported, and which shares the same library and virtual machine. Compatibility ends with Visual Basic version 6; VBA is incompatible with Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET). VBA is proprietary to Microsoft and, apart from the COM interface, is not an open standard.

Automation[edit]

Interaction with the host application uses OLE Automation. Typically, the host application provides a type library and application programming interface (API) documentation which document how VBA programs can interact with the application. This documentation can be examined from inside the VBA development environment using its Object Browser.

Visual Basic for Applications programs which are written to use the OLE Automation interface of one application cannot be used to automate a different application, even if that application hosts the Visual Basic runtime, because the OLE Automation interfaces will be different. For example, a VBA program written to automate Microsoft Word cannot be used with a different word processor, even if that word processor hosts VBA.

Conversely, multiple applications can be automated from the one host by creating Application objects within the VBA code. References to the different libraries must be created within the VBA client before any of the methods, objects, etc. become available to use in the application. This is achieved through what is referred to as Early or Late Binding. These application objects create the OLE link to the application when they are first created. Commands to the different applications must be done explicitly through these application objects in order to work correctly.

As an example, VBA code written in Microsoft Access can establish references to the Excel, Word and Outlook libraries; this allows creating an application that --- for instance --- runs a query in Access, exports the results to Excel and analyzes them, and then formats the output as tables in a Word document or sends them as an Outlook email.

VBA programs can be attached to a menu button, a macro, a keyboard shortcut, or an OLE/COM event, such as the opening of a document in the application. The language provides a user interface in the form of UserForms, which can host ActiveX controls for added functionality.

Inter-process communication automation includes the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) and RealTimeData (RTD) which allows calling a Component Object Model (COM) automation server for dynamic or realtime financial or scientific data.^[5]

Security concerns[edit]

As with any common programming language, VBA macros can be created with malicious intent. Using VBA, most of the security features lie in the hands of the user, not the author. The VBA host application options are accessible to the user. The user who runs any document containing VBA macros can preset the software with user preferences. End-users can protect themselves from attack by disabling macros from running in an application or by granting permission for a document to run VBA code only if they are sure that the source of the document can be trusted.

Version history[edit]

• VBA was first launched with MS Excel 5.0 in 1993. It became an instant success among developers to create corporate solutions using Excel. Inclusion of VBA with Microsoft Project, Access and Word replacing AccessBASIC and WordBASIC respectively made it more popular.
• VBA 4.0 is the next famous release with a totally upgraded version compared to previous one. Released in 1996, it is written in C++ and became an object oriented language.
• VBA 5.0 was launched in 1997 along with all of MS Office 97 products. The only exception for this was Outlook 97 which used VBScript to automate things.
• VBA 6.0 and VBA 6.1 were launched in 1999, notably with support for COM add-ins in Office 2000. VBA 6.2 was released alongside Office 2000 SR-1.
• VBA 6.3 was released after Office XP, VBA 6.4 followed Office 2003 and VBA 6.5 was released with Office 2007.
• Office 2010 includes VBA 7.0. There are no new features in VBA 7 for developers compared to VBA 6.5 except for 64-bit support. However, after VBA 6.5/Office 2007, Microsoft stopped licensing VBA for other applications.
• Office 2013, Office 2016, and Office 2019 include VBA 7.1.

Development[edit]

As of July 1, 2007, Microsoft no longer offers VBA distribution licenses to new customers. Microsoft intended to add .NET-based languages to the current version of VBA ever since the release of the .NET Framework,^[6] of which versions 1.0 and 1.1 included a scripting runtime technology named Script for the .NET Framework.^[7] Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003 SDK contained a separate scripting IDE called Visual Studio for Applications (VSA) that supported VB.NET.^[8][9][10] One of its significant features was that the interfaces to the technology were available via Active Scripting (VBScript and JScript), allowing even .NET-unaware applications to be scripted via .NET languages. However, VSA was deprecated in version 2.0 of the .NET Framework,^[10] leaving no clear upgrade path for applications desiring Active Scripting support (although 'scripts' can be created in C#, VBScript, and other .NET languages, which can be compiled and executed at run-time via libraries installed as part of the standard .NET runtime).

Microsoft dropped VBA support for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac.^[11][12] VBA was restored in Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. Microsoft said that it has no plan to remove VBA from the Windows version of Office.^[13][14]

With Office 2010, Microsoft introduced VBA7, which contains a true pointer data type: LongPtr. This allows referencing 64-bit address space. The 64-bit install of Office 2010 does not support common controls of MSComCtl (TabStrip, Toolbar, StatusBar, ProgressBar, TreeView, ListViews, ImageList, Slider, ImageComboBox) or MSComCt2 (Animation, UpDown, MonthView, DateTimePicker, FlatScrollBar), so legacy 32-bit code ported to 64-bit VBA code that depends on these common controls will not function. This does not affect the 32-bit version Office 2010.^[15] VBA7 includes no 64-bit version of the common controls, so it leaves developers with no means to migrate VBA applications to 64-bit. Microsoft suggests contacting the software vendor for 64-bit versions of VBA controls.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^'Compatibility Between the 32-bit and 64-bit Versions of Office 2010'. msdn.microsoft.com.
2. ^'Reflection Desktop VBA Guide'. docs.attachmate.com. Retrieved 2017-07-01.
3. ^'2016 SolidWorks Help – VBA'. help.solidworks.com. Retrieved 2016-07-25.
4. ^ ^ab'ACC: Visual/Access Basic Is Both a Compiler and an Interpreter'. Microsoft. 2012. Archived from the original on 2012-10-21.Cite uses deprecated parameter |dead-url= (help)
5. ^'How to set up and use the RTD function in Excel'. msdn.microsoft.com.
6. ^'Visual Studio for Applications'. Archived from the original on 2007-12-17.Cite uses deprecated parameter |deadurl= (help)
7. ^'Introducing Visual Studio for Applications'. msdn.microsoft.com.
8. ^'Script Happens .NET'. msdn.microsoft.com.
9. ^'Microsoft Takes Wraps Off VSA Development Technology'. Archived from the original on 2007-12-17.Cite uses deprecated parameter |deadurl= (help)
10. ^ ^ab'VSA scripting in .NET'. Archived from the original on 2007-02-11.Cite uses deprecated parameter |deadurl= (help)
11. ^'WWDC: Microsoft updates Universal status of Mac apps'. Macworld. 2006-08-07. Retrieved 2007-05-25.
12. ^'What is Microsoft Office and Office 365 – FAQs'.
13. ^'The Reports of VBA's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated'.
14. ^'Clarification on VBA Support'.
15. ^'Compatibility Between the 32-bit and 64-bit Versions of Office 2010'. msdn.microsoft.com.

Open Visual Basic In Excel 2016