Products · Product
VBA
Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2014–2025), in 11 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Learning VBA requires lots of boilerplate helper codeUnreviewed
20142026- Most Excel users can't find the VBA editor or know how to tweak its logic2025-12-21
- Making minor tweaks across many worksheets is tedious and manual2023-01-25
- Painful to use, and Excel offers no alternative scripting option2020-03-14
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 12 complaints
- Most Excel users can't find the VBA editor or know how to tweak its logic2025-12-21
- Code breaks on non-English installs with unhelpful errors that are hard to reproduce2023-11-15
- Only error handling option was On Error Resume Next, forcing manual error code checks2023-11-15
- Making minor tweaks across many worksheets is tedious and manual2023-01-25
- Terrible IDE and atrocious error system make the language painful to use2022-08-23
- Painful to use, and Excel offers no alternative scripting option2020-03-14
- Users must click through many security controls and macro warnings2019-11-25
- Learning VBA is painful, with few conveniences and lots of boilerplate helper code2019-10-22
- Fossil VBA editor unchanged for decades feels like a disaster to use2018-10-01
- Annoying to program in, with little help from the IDE2018-05-16
- No way to search across modules, making it hard to find code2017-12-15
- Official IDE is buggy and often gets into unsane states between debugging2014-10-16