“What People Think VBA Is — And Why They’re So Very Wrong”

In the noisy world of social media, where tutorials are viral and “tips” are 60 seconds long, the story of Excel VBA has been hijacked. Most people today don’t actually understand what VBA is. They think they do — because they’ve seen a LinkedIn post, a YouTube hack, or a TikTok clip with a fast-talking instructor saying “Let’s automate this with a simple macro!”

But what they think they’re learning isn’t VBA. It’s a meme version of it. A cartoon. A shadow. And that matters — because this misconception is now widespread, and it’s actively blocking individuals and organisations from realising VBA’s enormous strategic power.

1. The Popular Misconception: VBA = Recorded Macros + Amateur Scripting

Ask the average LinkedIn poster or YouTube instructor what VBA is, and they’ll say something like:

“It’s how you record a macro in Excel.”
“It’s like writing little scripts to automate tasks.”
“It’s old, clunky, and being replaced by Office Scripts, Python, or Power Automate.”

This is what most people believe:

• VBA is just what happens when you hit Record Macro.
• VBA is for “light automation” of mundane tasks.
• VBA is “a bit of coding” — useful, but ultimately primitive.
• VBA is being phased out — it’s a relic of the past.

And this myth is perpetuated with confidence — not from technical experts, but from people who have never used VBA to solve real business problems beyond the individual spreadsheet level.

2. How Did This Narrative Take Over?

This warped perception didn’t arise by accident. It is the inevitable result of:

• Influencer education models: Social media rewards fast content, not accurate content. So we get “how-to” clips that reduce VBA to “click here, type this, done!”
• Recorded macro tutorials: Recording macros is often taught as the entry point to VBA. But this is like learning guitar by watching someone press random frets and calling it a chord.
• Superficial training platforms: Courses on LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, and similar platforms often sell VBA as an “introductory scripting tool,” designed for personal productivity — not enterprise architecture.
• Over-hyped alternatives: Tools like Power Query and Office Scripts are positioned as “modern replacements” — further reinforcing the idea that VBA is legacy tech.

And so, a generation of users — including those in mid-career professional roles — have been raised on a shallow, unstructured, and misleading introduction to one of the most powerful automation engines in business computing.

3. What’s Missing from This Picture?

Everything.

The entire paradigm of VBA as an interface to the COM object model — gone.
The role of VBA in building client-server architectures with databases — never mentioned.
The fact that VBA remains the only direct way to programmatically manipulate Excel’s object model on the desktop — omitted.
The use of VBA to build process automation engines across multiple applications (Outlook, Access, Word, Internet Explorer, even third-party tools) — erased.

Instead of being taught how VBA can transform workflows at the organisational level, users are shown how to write six lines of code that copy values from one sheet to another.

4. Why This Misinformation Is Dangerous

It’s not just inaccurate. It’s expensive.

Because the illusion of VBA-as-hobby-scripting leads organisations to:

• Underestimate what they already have.
• Buy expensive tools to solve problems VBA could handle.
• Assume that Excel can’t be part of a modern enterprise architecture.
• Fail to invest in training that connects VBA to real-world business processes.

When a technology is misrepresented, it gets misused — or ignored. And when people believe that VBA is just for personal tinkering, they miss the fact that it has powered mission-critical solutions for decades in finance, logistics, operations, and more.

5. Conclusion: Time to Rethink VBA

What VBA is thought to be today is a shadow of its real power.

This false narrative is kept alive by social media, training courses, and a lack of historical and architectural context. It presents VBA as a quaint hobby, a disposable toy. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

To see VBA clearly, we need to unlearn what social media taught us. Because the real story of VBA — as a gateway to serious business automation — hasn’t changed. It’s just been buried under a pile of buzzwords and oversimplified tutorials.

And the tragedy is this: people aren’t rejecting VBA because they’ve tried it and found it lacking. They’re rejecting it because they’ve never actually seen it.