Visual Basic for Applications

Discontinuation of the VBA Licensing Program

Since June 1996, when we first announced the Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA) licensing program, we have been offering VBA for licensing to Independent Software Vendors and others who wished to integrate VBA into their own applications. As previously announced, Microsoft does not expect to make significant enhancements to VBA. This does not impact the current support commitments for VBA in any way, and of course, it does not impact any license arrangements that are in force. In particular, this does not impact VBA in Microsoft Office products.

Microsoft is investing its application programmability resources in Microsoft® Visual Studio® Tools for Applications (VSTA) and its companion set of tools, Microsoft® Visual Studio® Tools for Office (VSTO). We encourage you to consider VSTA for new applications that require application programmability technology. Summit Software is Microsoft’s vendor for VSTA licensing.

As of July 1, 2007, Microsoft will no longer offer VBA distribution licenses to new customers. Existing VBA customers can still purchase additional VBA licenses from Summit Software and Microsoft for existing solutions.

Turbocharge Your Apps with Visual Studio Tools for Applications
Visual Studio Tools for Applications delivers an advanced environment for application customization built on the Microsoft .NET Framework – now in use by millions of developers worldwide.

Product Information

Frequently Asked Questions about VBA
See the answers to the most common questions about Visual Basic for Applications.

VBA Language References
Find links to download the VBA language references, for Office 2003 as well as links to online versions of the language references for prior versions of Office.

Visual Basic for Applications 6.5 SDK Changes from Prior Release

Read about the features, benefits, and enhancements of VBA 6.5 SDK from the prior release.

VBA 6.5 SDK Access

No Evaluation CD is available for the VBA 6.5 SDK, but there are two other methods for access.

Articles and Whitepapers

Convert VBA Code to Visual Basic .NET When Migrating to Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office
Convert code from Visual Basic for Applications to Visual Basic .NET when migrating to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System. This document highlights the reasons to migrate, the major code conversion issues, and additional resources for further details. (March 2005)

Overview of Code Snippets Using Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office
IntelliSense code snippets for Visual Studio Tools for Office provide a quick start for Word and Excel development tasks in Visual Studio, Version 2005 Beta 1, including data import/export, collaboration, and integration with Excel and Word controls. (December 2004)

What's New in Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office
The new features of Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System, Version 2005, include the project system, a visual designer for Microsoft Office Word 2003 and Microsoft Office Excel 2003, view controls, actions pane support, visual data binding, data caching, and server-side programming. (October 2004)

Comparing Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications 6.0 and Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System
Create a Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System or Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications 6.0 project: Which is the best choice for your solution? Read this article to discover the ways these environments differ and ultimately work together. (November 2003)

Ten Tips for Microsoft Office VBA Library Development
Discover ten tips for writing code that targets the Office Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) version 6.3 library. (July 2002)

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The “Everything We Could Find on Microsoft VBA” List
A resource list of VBA-related newsgroups, blogs, etc.

Licensing VBA
Licensing VBA enables you to distribute your VBA-enabled application to customers.

Technical Support for VBA
Learn about the technical support options available to you before, during, and after the VBA licensing process.

VBA Partner Program
When you license VBA, you automatically become a member of the Microsoft VBA Partner Program. Read about some of the benefits you'll get as a partner.

Licensing Partners
See the companies which have licensed VBA and the products they have VBA-enabled.

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