> It fills the niche that VBA used to of shadow-IT automation.
As far as I'm concerned, nothing does. People who haven't used it just won't know :-(
The full Visual Basic with GUI drag-drop forms designer[1] mash-up with Microsoft Excel, so the spreadsheet is the form and you can drag-drop the standard components like buttons and textboxes onto the spreadsheet[2], doubleclick them and be inside the full VBA IDE in a button handler subroutine with syntax highlighting and autocomplete and classic on-device full language help and everything[3].
Sure you can't easily version control the code, audit the code, and all that, but it was beautifully hacky and convenient in the way that only "automating a GUI program" can be, and PowerShell and Python can never be, and smartphone apps never are, and web apps never are[4], and nothing I know of has replaced it.
As far as I'm concerned, nothing does. People who haven't used it just won't know :-(
The full Visual Basic with GUI drag-drop forms designer[1] mash-up with Microsoft Excel, so the spreadsheet is the form and you can drag-drop the standard components like buttons and textboxes onto the spreadsheet[2], doubleclick them and be inside the full VBA IDE in a button handler subroutine with syntax highlighting and autocomplete and classic on-device full language help and everything[3].
Sure you can't easily version control the code, audit the code, and all that, but it was beautifully hacky and convenient in the way that only "automating a GUI program" can be, and PowerShell and Python can never be, and smartphone apps never are, and web apps never are[4], and nothing I know of has replaced it.
[1] https://devclass.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/vb6-768x565....
[2] https://www.homeandlearn.org/images/user_forms/launch_form_b... and https://analystcave.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/excel-vba...
[3] https://process.filestackapi.com/cache=expiry:max/XJdCsULaRU...
[4] Userscripts and Greasemonkey and the like make it somewhat possible, but it is not convenient or beautiful or properly supported.