In addition to Microsoft, numerous companies have used VBA to add the programming capabilities to their own applications. Visual Basic for Applications is also implemented in applications published by other companies including AutoCAD, ArcGIS, CATIA, CorelDraw and SolidWorks. VBA enables an application, such as Excel, to run a program internally and provide a customized version of Excel for a specific purpose, such as how long it takes to earn $1 million in an investment portfolio based on a specific interest rate and the number of years until retirement.
On July 1, 2007, Microsoft stopped offering VBA distribution licenses to new customers. Microsoft created Visual Studio that contained a separate scripting tool called Visual Studio for Applications (VSA) that supported Visual Basic .NET. One of VSA’s main features was that the interfaces were available through active scripting, allowing .NET-unaware applications to be scripted via .NET languages. However, VSA was retired in the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework, leaving no alternative for applications desiring active scripting support. Microsoft ended Visual Basic for Applications support for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac computers. However, VBA support was restored in Microsoft Office for Mac 2011.
