Hi Rob,

The latest Excel I've used is 2002, which has VBA. Works great.
I don't know if Excel 2003 has VBA.

Yes it does.

My guess is that a future Excel will use VB.NET instead of VBA (or maybe
both at the same time)

I think it would be financial suicide for Microsoft stop including VBA in
Office; the large numbers of their corporate customers that have significant
VBA-based applications would simply not upgrade to that version.

On the other hand, the Visual Studio Tools for Office is an attempt to bring
Office to the .Net developer, so it's a reasonable assumption that efforts
will be made to also bring .Net to the Office developer (which is a VERY
different prospect!).

When/if .Net is introduced to Office, I'm pretty sure that it will be
alongside VBA and the market will decide how much it's used.

Does anyone know any different. Where is VBA going? Does it have a future?

Yes, VBA has a long future. Considering that the XLM macro language was last
used as the primary programming language in Excel 4, but is still supported
some ten years later in Excel 2003, I would expect to see support for VBA
remaining for (at least) a similar timeframe.

What should I be doing now to protect myself and ease migration/maintenance?

Not a lot <g. Anything you *do* do now is just as likely to lead you down
the wrong path as the correct one. If we can assume that .Net will be
introduced to Office using VB.Net and/or C# (i.e. not a new VBA.Net language),
you might want to start learning about VB.Net, the .Net framework and the
issues that occur when converting VB6 applications to VB.Net, as most of those
are likely to occur with VBA too.

Regards

Stephen Bullen
Microsoft MVP - Excel
www.BMSLtd.ie