Advantages of VB over VBA?

[Err]

If you were making the argument to a guy who's position it was to say no to requests to install visual basic -How would you make a case for having Visual Basic installed?

The reason I'm asking is that I'm not sure if there are some limits on VBA that are not there on VB.

Right now my argument is that certain people need to access my programs who do not know anything about "allowing" macros on their machines. What else should I say?

 

[lenze]

Don't know about your situation, but when I worked for the State of Montana and needed a program or routine, IT always balked. No problem. I simply went to my boss's boss and told him I needed it and would make the reports he got much better. Usually took less than an hour.

lenze

 

[tusharm]

{snip}
Right now my argument is that certain people need to access my programs who do not know anything about "allowing" macros on their machines. What else should I say?

Maybe, you should invest in learning how to write solutions that don't require people to "allow" macros.
http://www.mrexcel.com/board2/viewtopic.php?p=148963#148963

 

[Legacy 98055]

I guess it depends on what you currently use VBA for. The heart of VB is still the VBA library. If you create many userforms, that alone is good enough reason to invest in VB in my opinion. You can easily create an exe stub to open your various workbooks and bypass the macros prompt. If you have VB you do not need Office Dev. The memory limitation is the same in VB. 64k per.

Things you cannot do in VBA.
Compile your code.
Create the very much under utilized smart tags.
Create the very much under utilized automation server. (COM addin that allows functions to be called natively)
The code is considerably faster in some situations.
Create addins for other compliant apps such as Word and Outlook.
more...

 

[BrianB]

I use VB and VBA.
The basic difference is that VBA is generally only used to manipulate the Microsoft Office group of applications (which is the only way to obtain VBA). ie. VBA can only be used from within a MS Office application.

Visual Basic can be used to make standalone applications which need not have any relationship to MS Office (.exe files) - although can also manipulate MSO applications.

So VB does more than VBA.

 

[Legacy 98055]

"VBA can only be used from within a MS Office". Actually it can be used wherever it is supported. There are more than a few third party applications that host VBA just a office does. Another consumer of VBA is VB itself which makes up a very large segment of the VB language.