Given that it is so despised, it should be notably less popular than the second most popular language. How is this possible when VBA is the “ most dreaded programming language” according to Stack Overflow in 2020? VBA is not as dead as you think. Are business and technical users turning to other solutions to automate Excel?Ī quick search on LinkedIn shows that there are still over 15 thousand jobs that are requesting VBA. Popularity in the language has dropped over 60% from it’s peak in 2004.

As a programming language that was available for business users, millions of macros have been created in VBA.

An example just occurred: In the second sentence before this one, I initially spoke the word 'select' in its singular form, but when I asked it to be selected so that I could convert it to its plural form the cursor highlighted the word 'select', but then kept moving backwards through the paragraph highlighting everything along the way!! Now a variety of additional malfunctions are showing up so much so that I turned off Dragon and typed this last bit.Since 1993, Visual Basic for Applications has been the first choice for Excel automation. From that point on many other functional features stop work properly. Sometimes it does it properly, but more often it moves the cursor back in my document several lines, even several paragraphs, a nd selects parts of two words that are next to each other as well as the space in between them. One thing I've run into repeatedly is that a lot of problems show up when I direct it to select a particular word. (However, just to be clear, when I say that Dragon Dictate is now able to run in MS Word, I'm NOT saying that it runs properly in Microsoft Word, nor for that fact does it operate properly in the Mac email app. Hoping that I had achieved my goal, I went back to Microsoft Word and was happy to find that Dragon Dictate was now able to run. The final line said that the installation was successful. When I clicked that, small window opened on my screen with a bunch of lines of what looked like software commands. I clicked on that and was met by window filled with what looked like little Lego cubes, and one of those cubes was named ' Visual Basic for amework'. Several folders then showed up and one was named Frameworks. I selected that and a window opened containing one folder icon named Contents so I clicked on that. One of the menu items that showed up was 'show package contents'. Reading one of the above posts I started with Finder, opened the Applications folder, then I right-clicked on the Microsoft Word icon. I just ran into this problem trying to use Dragon Dictate in the beta for Microsoft Word 15(16?) on my iMac Retina 5K.

Visual basic applications