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Introducing two new Wise Owl courses on Office Scripts
This blog gives the background to Microsoft's decision to roll out Office Scripts, and explains why you might want to learn how to automate Excel using scripts, rather than VBA (and how you'd then go about doing this).

Posted by Andy Brown on 30 November 2022

In this blog

Why Microsoft dislike VBA, and the need for Office Scripts
Introducing Office Scripts
Our Office Scripts courses

Introducing new Wise Owl courses on Office Scripts

You may have noticed recently that a new tab has appeared on your Excel ribbon:

The new Automate tab - what's this about?

If you click on this you'll see something like this:

Scripts? What are these?

The rest of this blog explains what scripts are, and why you might want to learn about them.

Why Microsoft dislike VBA, and the need for Office Scripts

For some years now Microsoft have been trying to kill off Visual Basic for Applications, mainly because of the security risks it poses:

Every time someone chooses the options below, another Microsoft security expert experiences a cold wind of doom blow over them.

Here are some of the things they've tried:

Experiment	Notes
Visual Studio Tools for Office	An attempt to provide a single coding environment within Visual Studio, this never really took off because most Excel coders aren't developers - just people trying to speed up their working lives.
JavaScript for Office	An ill-fated attempt to get people to use JavaScript to automate their Excel workbooks, despite the fact it was harder to install and use.

In addition to this, Microsoft wanted to provide some way for programmers to automate Excel online workbooks (and there was no way they were going to let VBA run in their cloud!).

Introducing Office Scripts

It seems to me that Microsoft have learnt from their past mistakes and got things right with the introduction of Office Scripts:

A typical Office Scripts function - if you're a web developer the language should look familiar.

Office Scripts is essentially a superset of TypeScript, a language developed by Microsoft to sit on top of JavaScript and get rid of some of its wrinkles. Here are some reasons why I think this is a very sensible business decision:

Plus point	Notes
Universality	JavaScript is the world's most popular programming language, so it makes sense to use this as a base language.
Web compatibility	Microsoft had no choice but to choose a language which runs on web pages, since these Excel Online is essentially a glorified website. JavaScript was the obvious option.
Robustness	Notwithstanding the above, JavaScript is a horrible language to work with because nothing is strongly typed (so when you declare a variable, for example, you don't even say what sort of information it contains, which leads to frequent and horrible bugs). TypeScript adds rigour to JavaScript while still being recognisably the same language.

Even before the announcement of Office Scripts we were intending to convert our website to use TypeScript rather than JavaScript for client-side programming.

Our Office Scripts courses

We now offer the following Office Scripts courses:

Course	Days	Notes
Introduction to Office Scripts	2	An introduction to how to automate Excel using Office Scripts.
Advanced Office Scripts	2	For those who have attended the introduction course, a more in-depth look at what you can do with scripts in Excel, including linking to Power Automate. At the moment this is only available as a tailored course.

So if you want to add to your CV, automate Excel in the cloud or just modernise your IT skills, here's your chance!

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

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Introducing new Wise Owl courses on Office Scripts

Why Microsoft dislike VBA, and the need for Office Scripts

Introducing Office Scripts

Our Office Scripts courses

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