Why VBA?

I have the great fortune, if you want to call it that, of being the Microsoft Office expert in my office. This is yet another one of those accidental tours of duty that I never saw coming, but I sort of landed here without knowing how.

(The most likely answer, by the way, is that I'm an Office geek instead of an Office user. What's the difference? Office users use the application out of job necessity, learn new application features out of that necessity, and stop when the necessity does. Office geeks use and learn the application out of an obsessive curiosity, and never know when the hell to stop. But I digress.)

Based on having been anointed said expert, I saw it my sacred duty to beta test Office 2008, so that I could warn my peers about what was ahead for them. (I got the little key fob and the copy of Office 2008 to prove it.) Before I go any further, let me say that this entry will do nothing to slam the Beta team; Derek and the rest of the guys and gals were wonderfully receptive and supportive the whole time.

As anyone who knows Office 2008 knows, Microsoft made the business decision to remove VBA from it. And as anyone who knows me knows, I make a large part of my living using VBA in Excel.

And I'm not going to add my voice to the sound and fury in response to Eric Schweib's blog about this subject, which you can find here.

Instead, I'm going to ask a different question:
What did we need VBA in Excel for in the first place?

Speaking for myself, it's because my various and sundry applications that I have to use don't do what I want them to, so I have to use Excel to scrub and unify that data. Granted, I can do most of the aforementioned scrubbing with some rather lengthy formulas, but macros automate even the process of inserting said formula and AutoFilling it down, thereby resulting in one less step.

Ugh.

I start to think sometimes that keeping VBA in Excel up until Excel 2004 enabled people like me to create unsustainable, house-of-cards processes that were doomed to fail eventually anyway, and taking away VBA might be the best thing for us.

On the other hand, I don't have anything cross-platform to replace it with, because I work in a mixed platform shop.

But I guess what I'm really wondering is, "Where's the VSTO for the Mac?" What I really need is the ability to create custom applications that can "hook" into Microsoft Excel, and SalesForce, and other applications.

Anyone?