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Comparing Office Scripts with VBA Part four of a four-part series of blogs
Until recently, if you wanted to automate a Microsoft Excel workbook your only real choice was the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) programming language. Now, there's a new option for adding code to Excel: Office Scripts for Excel. There are many similarities between Office Scripts and VBA, as well as some significant differences. This blog provides a comparison of the two systems. Comparing Features of Office Scripts and VBA Advantages of Office Scripts Advantages of VBA Conclusions (this blog)

Comparing Office Scripts with VBA

Part four of a four-part series of blogs

Until recently, if you wanted to automate a Microsoft Excel workbook your only real choice was the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) programming language. Now, there's a new option for adding code to Excel: Office Scripts for Excel. There are many similarities between Office Scripts and VBA, as well as some significant differences. This blog provides a comparison of the two systems.

Comparing Features of Office Scripts and VBA
Advantages of Office Scripts
Advantages of VBA
Conclusions (this blog)

Posted by Andrew Gould on 29 June 2023

In this blog

A summary of the differences
Conclusions

Office Scripts vs. VBA: Conclusions

If you've read the previous parts of the blog, you should have a pretty good idea of the pros and cons of each system. This part of the blog summarises the differences and draws a conclusion.

A summary of the differences

The table below summarises the differences between Office Scripts and VBA.

Feature	Office Scripts	VBA
Used in Excel for the Web?	Yes	No
Integrates with Power Automate?	Yes	No
Controls applications other than Excel?	No	Yes
Displays user interface elements like forms?	No	Yes
Can be triggered by events?	No	Yes

Conclusions

So, which of the two systems should you be using? The answer is: it depends!

If you want to write code that can run in Excel for the web across a range of platforms, your only choice is to use Office Scripts.

If, however, your development is focused on the desktop and you want your code to use a range of applications, VBA is still the go-to option.

Where the two systems overlap, your choice is mainly down to personal preference. If you're already familiar with VBA you'll almost certainly create a solution faster than using Office Scripts. If, however, you want to future-proof your skills, it may be worth investing the time in developing an Office Scripts solution.

One thing that is certain: Office Scripts is not a complete replacement for VBA (at least not yet). Both systems still have an important role to play and I expect they will continue to coexist for several years to come.