VB & VBA in a Nutshell: The Language

1.2. A Brief History of VBA

The incredible popularity of Visual Basic shortly after its launch prompted Microsoft to wonder if a "cut down" version of the product could replace the many different macro languages lurking behind its range of business applications. Bill Gates talked for many years—since the days of DOS—of a universal batch language. This goal is now coming to fruition in the shape of VBA. However, as the following chronology shows, this goal wasn't achieved overnight:

1993—VBA launched with Microsoft Excel

VBA first saw the light of day as a replacement for the macro language in Microsoft Excel. Its power and sophistication in comparison to the original macro languages made it an instant success with those developers creating custom solutions with Excel.

1994—VBA included with Microsoft Project

Perhaps because Microsoft Project had to be customized in many situations to satisfy the wide and varied needs of project managers, Project was next on the list of applications to be VBA-enabled.

1995—Included with Microsoft Access, replacing Access Basic

Perhaps the biggest boost to VBA came when Access Basic (a subset of VBA written specifically for Access) was replaced with the full version of VBA. Many of today's VB programmers apprenticed on VBA in Access, cutting their teeth on custom applications using VBA and Access. Many Access developers have moved on to the full version of Visual Basic to create full three-tier client server applications.

1996—VBA becomes the ...