vba - Office 365 versus desktop Excel macros

Sorry if the title is very vague, I've been trying to work my way around this for a little while now, but I have to say that I know very little about Office 365 and its abouts.

I've developed a series of macros in Excel 2010 that include input of data and automation of subprocesses, but recently we've been told that we're more definetely moving to the Online platform of Office 365, and as you already know, Excel online does not supports macros -or any VBA really, as far as I know.

So I was wondering if there was another way to make it work? I'm open to any ideas at this point!

Thank you in advance!

Answer

[...] we've been told that we're more definetely moving to the Online platform of Office 365, and as you already know, Excel online does not supports macros -or any VBA really

That is correct. VBA is a COM technology that has a lot of dependencies on Windows-specific things. That Microsoft managed to get it to run on Mac is rather impressive already, and I'm not even mentioning the fiendishly complex work of making a workable Mac-VBA editor.

VBA will be supported on Windows desktop for the foreseeable future, but making it work on all the platforms Office 365 runs on is simply unrealistic, and isn't going to happen.

Is that the death of VBA? Of course not. Microsoft knows there are millions of business-critical macro-enabled worksheets out there running VBA code, and as far as I know VBA will definitely keep being supported on Windows.

If your company is moving to Office 365 cloud, then your VBA code needs to be ported/rewritten in TypeScript, using office-js, from scratch: that should have been a cost that was factored into the decision to go all-web. If your company isn't prepared to have all VBA code ported, then depending on how business-critical the VBA code is you'll want to keep a desktop install for the workstations that need to run VBA code.

The Microsoft Office Extensibility team is actively monitoring the office-js tag on SO, Michael being the top answerer in that tag.

You'll probably want to get into the insider program to benefit from the latest bug fixes and new features, as Office-JS is under very active development, and user feedback is absolutely welcome and taken into account.

Disclaimer: I'm a Microsoft Excel MVP.