You lucky devs: It's Microsoft Office 2016 ... and VBA lives on

Office JavaScript library will be complete across Office 365, iOS and Mac by early 2016

Microsoft's new focus: web and cross-platform

Microsoft's Steve Guggenheimer

Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s Corporate VP and developer evangelist, confirmed to the Reg that the likes of VBA and VSTO are now considered legacy. “Going back to a model which is all rich client and client server, which is what those technologies were built for, doesn’t make much sense.”

Microsoft is focusing instead on the web-style and cross-platform Office Add-ins mentioned above, but also on Office 365 APIs. There are some features of Office 2016 which depend on Office 365, such as Groups in Outlook, which provide a workspace and mailing list for a group of contacts. There are other features which exist only in Microsoft’s cloud, including the Office Graph (a name inspired by Facebook’s Graph API) which analyses the links between people and content to measure relevancy. A related product called Office Delve surfaces relevant content, the idea being that documents that belong to projects you work on or people you work with magically appear. Another Office 365 product is Office Sway, for building presentations with automatic layout. Developers can use new Office 365 APIs to query the Office Graph, and create custom content that appears in Delve.

“I do think the newer services model, the Sway and the Delve are interesting, the Office Graph is interesting,” says Guggenheimer.

Is Microsoft is now short-changing those who do not use its cloud by making so many Office features dependent on Office 365? Guggenheimer says this is partly a process of experimentation, where features are tried out first in Office 365 and may later be brought to on-premises deployments via SharePoint. “The platforms are built in a way where we could do that,” he says.

Office development has always been about automation, and although the platform has never been as elegant or as performant as developers would like, creating and parsing documents automatically can save such a huge amount of time that it is still worth it. The new Office add-in model is in some ways better than what came before, and in some ways worse, but the fact that it is web-hosted and works cross-platform is the crucial point in its favour.

You can also expect Microsoft to continue pushing developers towards coding for Office 365 and hooking users to its cloud platform. That said, the ancient VBA still has its uses and the company at least has the sense to keep it going. ®