Microsoft Office Macro Hardening | ASD's Blueprint for Secure Cloud (2024)

FAQs

Is Microsoft discontinuing VBA? ›

No. Such rumors have been doing the rounds for more than 20 years, but they're not true. There are millions of users relying on VBA, including large businesses and organizations.

Remove Mark of the Web from a file

To unblock macros in a file, like one from the internet or an email attachment, remove the Mark of the Web on your local device. To remove, right-click on the file, choose Properties, and then select the Unblock checkbox on the General tab.

Malicious macros can do almost anything that other malware can do to your system, including emulating ransomware, stealing data, and emailing itself out to your contacts.

If you see a security warning when you open a document or try to run a macro, you can choose to make it a trusted document and enable macros. This example is on an Excel workbook. Select Enable Content. In the Security Warning dialog, select Yes to make the document trusted.

Re: Excel Online: replacement for VBA macros...

Scripting allows you to automate repetitive tasks and perform custom operations on your Excel data. It provides a set of JavaScript-based APIs that you can use to manipulate the Excel workbook, worksheets, ranges, and more.

Re: Will VBA be obsolete from excel? No, it is extremely unlikely that Microsoft will ditch VBA. There are far too many solutions all over the world that rely on it.

While macros may boost productivity, they can also pose a cybersecurity risk, as criminals can manipulate them by adding harmful code. This manipulation converts macros into carriers or pathways for the spread of malicious software, posing a significant threat to the security and integrity of computer systems.

By default, Excel disables all VBA macros with notification. This means that when you open a workbook that contains VBA macros, you'll see a yellow security warning bar at the top of the sheet. You can choose to enable or disable VBA macros for that workbook by clicking on the warning bar.

Enable all macros (not recommended, potentially dangerous code can run) Click this option to allow all macros to run. Using this setting makes your computer vulnerable to potentially malicious code and is not recommended.

What are the disadvantages of macros in Excel? ›

While macros can be recorded in many applications, the macro recorder doesn't actually know what you're trying to do, so it just takes a snapshot of the whole feature. That makes for a very messy chunk of code that does a lot of unnecessary things, some of which you may not want. So you have to learn VBA coding.

Macros reduce code readability

In real projects where multiple people work together this will make teamwork extremely hard. Once again, this is competitive programming and if you understand your own code that is all that matters.

Be wary of Microsoft Office documents containing macros. Macros are small bits of programming used to automate tasks that can also be used for spreading viruses and malware. Anti-virus programs cannot always catch all malicious macros.

In Word, you can automate frequently used tasks by creating and running macros. A macro is a series of commands and instructions that you group together as a single command to accomplish a task automatically. To save time on tasks you do often, bundle the steps into a macro. First, you record the macro.

Yes, people still use Excel VBA to run their business operations even in 2024. VBA is a powerful tool that allows its users to work efficiently by helping them create custom functions using scripts or codes in Excel.

Support for VBA has definitely not gone away. An update to your PC may have failed in a way that makes some of the supporting code not work.

A post by Microsoft in Feb 23 (7 months ago), stated that Microsoft "remains committed to Visual Basic and continue to invest in maintaining C# interop and Visual Studio features for folks that love Visual Basic." It has been interpreted by the community that VB.Net will not be further evolved but at the time of ...

Microsoft said it is still planning to block Visual Basic Applications (VBA) macros by default in Office apps after quietly rolling back the planned change last month.