Office Development Alternatives

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) are Microsoft’s primary Office development tools, but alternatives have existed and some are still supported. These other development technologies include the following:

Application-specific languages and developer interfaces have appeared in some versions of Office. For example, prior to Office 97, WordBasic and Excel Macros were used to automate tasks in their respective applications. These languages were not cross-compatible with other applications, different skills were required for development in each, and they were supplanted by VBA. Custom development on InfoPath forms was originally only supported through the use of VBScript or JScript; it is now also supported with Visual Studio for Applications (VSTA) and VSTO. A macro language specific to Access, separate from VBA, is still offered and has been enhanced in Access 2010.

The Information Bridge Framework (IBF) enabled Office applications to access data via Web services. It was used to build Duet 1.0 for Microsoft Office and SAP, a product for integrating Office with SAP applications, but the IBF has been discontinued and replaced with SharePoint-based technologies.