From my first post on this group this morning I was impressed by the quality
and professional responses I received. I feel the knowledge is here to get
a good handle on this, a question on Visual Basic Versions and what
direction I should take. Some background is in order.

As an old IBM 360 o/s BAL programmer, and also a EXCP channel programmer
dealing with interrupt routines, my first experience with BASIC was on DEC
PDP 11/40 & 11/70 RSTS time sharing systems. I really liked what you could
do with the DEC BASIC and wrote a number of programs and developed video
support macros for the application programmers. Later in life, on Windows
based PC's, I got somewhat into writing a few M/S Word and Excel macros. I
really enjoyed Excel macros and wrote some fairly complex ones, however, I
never spent enough time to become really good at it. When Excel moved from
their macros to VBA I did a little conversion but not much.

One day I decided to spend money and bought M/S VB 4.0 and the manuals.
Wrote a couple of small test programs but not as much as I would have liked
to do. Then came along VB 6.0 SP6 Professional Edition which I purchased.
Again not much time to spend and before I knew it VB 2008 Express Edition
was available which I installed.

As you may imagine I have a few VB versions and manuals. I also have Office
2007, so considering Word & Excel support of VB, plus what is available at
present what should I be moving towards? I'm wondering if I should rat hole
everything except VB 2008 Express? How does this relate to Visual Studio?
Small Basic? I hope to spend more time on VB and would like to be able to
grow in VB capability in Word, Excel, and stand alone VB applications I may
write.

Hopeful someone can clear this up for me. Thanks in advance.

Dave