I'm doing a gig where there is a need to write a few simple VBA macros for Word and Excel. This is a skill I haven't used in about 8 years -- and things have changed! Aside from the little detail that VBA is clearly in legacy mode, with minimal support, there's all the new security measures designed to close VBA as a malware vector.
Most of this can be worked around with a little effort. But here's a biggie: on some machines (not all for various reasons), the IT people have disabled VBA's ability to reference external libraries. If you give a user a VBA application that uses the MS scripting runtime (handy regular-expression API) or the automation library for another application (for controlling Word from Excel) they just don't work. If you open the VBA IDE on the user's machine, Tools/References is grayed out.
I could work with the IT people to re-enable library references, but there are also external users who might have this limitation. So I need a way to bypass it.
If I buy a certificate and sign the macros, will this give me back references? I can get them to spend the money, but I'm not going to do it unless I'm convinced it will solve the problem.