A strange absurdity plays out daily on social media—especially in the Excel community. You can see it vividly in a recent thread by Paul Barnes, where the recurring question is dragged out yet again: Is VBA dead? Will it die?

The conversation spirals into the usual circular logic. One commenter says their concern isn’t that VBA is dying—but that Excel itself might be moving too far into the cloud. Barnes responds with a rhetorical shrug: “Why would Microsoft want to keep it alive?” And just like that, the whole conversation pivots, not on evidence, but on sentiment and speculation.

What’s missing? Almost everything that matters.

Excel and VBA is the Gateway to the Future of Enterprise Productivity – not an obsolete Legacy that we’re stuck with!

Social media enables people to pick and choose their talking points with surgical precision—carefully avoiding evidence that challenges their beliefs. Posts that highlight VBA’s strengths, or its role in advanced Excel architectures, are routinely ignored. Counterarguments backed by real-world implementations, like those shared by myself and others such as Ismael Hosni, vanish into the void of algorithmic apathy.

This isn’t just frustrating—it’s a symptom of a deeper problem. Excel’s biggest opportunity today lies not in abandoning VBA, but in embracing it within a hub-and-spoke, client-server architecture that transforms Excel into a true enterprise platform. This is digital transformation at its most powerful—and it’s hiding in plain sight.

My demos, models, and real client work all show this: VBA is not a relic of the past. It is the engine behind scalable, auditable, high-value business systems. You cannot replicate these solutions easily with Python, Power Query, Office Scripts, or Lambdas alone—not without significantly more effort, complexity, and cost.

The idea that “because social media isn’t talking about it, it must not matter” is not just false—it’s actively harmful. It deprives users of understanding what’s possible. It blinds the community to a future where Excel becomes an even more powerful enterprise tool—cloud-integrated, version-controlled, and user-friendly—with VBA at the core.

Bald people speculating that combs may be phased out someday!

To those who argue VBA should be discontinued because of “legacy,” I say this: you’re missing the point. This isn’t about maintaining the past. It’s about seizing the future. Enterprises aren’t paying top-tier consultants because of nostalgia—they’re investing in real results, real transformation, and real value, enabled by VBA and Excel’s unmatched flexibility.

And yes—Office Scripts, Excel on the web, and even Google Sheets can play a role in this architecture. They can plug into the same processes, the same data structures. This isn’t exclusionary—it’s expansive.

So why are we still asking the wrong question?

We should be planting a flag, not digging a grave. VBA isn’t dead. It’s misunderstood, misrepresented, and massively underutilized.

The miracle of Excel is not just that it works—but that it works so powerfully with so little. And when that power is harnessed in the right architecture, it becomes more than just a spreadsheet—it becomes a system.

Let’s not allow social media noise to drown out the signal.

By Hiran de Silva

ABSTRACT

VBA and Excel’s Enterprise Opportunity

This piece argues against the notion that VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is obsolete in the context of Excel. The author contends that social media discussions often focus on speculation rather than evidence, overlooking VBA’s continued relevance in advanced Excel applications. They propose that VBA, when integrated into a hub-and-spoke, client-server architecture, transforms Excel into a powerful enterprise platform capable of handling complex business systems. The author asserts that other tools cannot easily replicate these solutions and that focusing on VBA’s “legacy” status misses its potential as an engine for future business value.