Part of my job right now is to build some dynamic functionalities into Microsoft Office documents. The only means I’ve found to do this is through VBA – and thus, the VBA editor which comes built in to Office docs.
The VBA editor is awful. It’s missing a million different functionalities that modern development environments need to support. But the worst part is that I’m a hard-core Vim lover, and the VBA editor is barely any better than notepad.
So: Is there any way I can effectively use Vim to do VBA programming? Short of copy-pasting my code into the VBA editor from a different window when I want to try it?
That’s an interesting opinion. I used VI briefly about fifteen years ago and based on that I contend that the VBA editor is far more suited to its purpose than VI (or VIM?) would be. Is there one particular piece of functionality that it is missing from the VBA editor that precludes you effectively using it for its purpose (editing VBA)? VBA has not been enhanced for many many years, but the fact is it can’t be killed off because everyone finds it so easy to use.
If you wish you can write some piece of code in your preferred language that manipulates your word document via COM objects (if it supports that). Then you can call your external piece of code from a simple stub within your Word document. You need to get around some security constraints though in your Word document.
For example I could write some code in VBScript or VBA or Powershell or .Net that manipulates a word doc. I can call that from a small piece of VBA (that might be attached to a button or something in the standard word toolbar)