Differences between Visual Basic Editor and Microsoft Script Editor?

Question

I'm starting to learn Excel Programming and have been doing the development in Excel Visual Basic Editor.

I now have the option to get Visual Studio 6, so I would like to know what are advantages of using Microsoft Script Editor.

What are your thoughts?

Answer 1

I don't see any advantage. The Excel VBA editor comes with everything you need to program in Excel.

Unless you are planning on writing custom COM objects, you don't need Visual Studio and you would only add an extra step to your development process by using it.

Answer 2

To start with, VBScript (the flavour of VB that ScriptEditor is aimed at) is very different to VBA in quite a lot of ways.

For example you cannot declare object types, and you cannot directly create an object such as a ADODB Connection.

VBA:

Dim myObject as ADODB.Connection
set myObject = new ADODB.Connection

VBScript:

dim myObject
set myObject = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")

Visual studio 6 does have advantages such as being able to easily add code to source safe, but you lose the ease of interacting with your Excel document (Sheet1.Range("rangeName"), etc)

In short, I would stick with the VBA editor built into Excel.

Answer 3

You can launch the Microsoft script editor straight from Excel - it's the last option on the Tools/Macro menu. Right beneath the VisualBasic Editor. But the script editor is for use when displaying worksheets (or other docs) as webpages. Magnifico and Rathboma are both correct. I do a lot of VBA / Excel. I finally got to the point where I wanted features the language doesn't have, but I like the editor and, after all, there aren't any better options for spreadsheet hacking. There IS Resolver, the python-based spreadsheet app. Better than VBA in some ways, but I can't use it for work. But if you have a choice you can get Resolver for free.