Google Apps macros - how do they compare to Office VBA macros?

Question

Do any of you use the javascript macro capabilities of Google Apps, particularly for spreadsheets? How do the capabilities compare? Is there anything that Google Apps can't do that can be done with VBA macros?

Answer 1

I am in the middle of conversion of a complex project from VBA to Google Apps Script as an experiment to see what can be done and what can't.

In general, the development environment for google apps script is primitive and frustrating. The language is of course javaScript so if you already know that then you have a head start. The problem though is that many of the advantages of javaScript are not realizable since you don't actually have access to DOM elements, and neither do you have an equivalent of Excel shapes - except through the UI object- which is essentially the same as an excel form, with the same kind of events and objects etc.

Another issue is general slowness. You need to be careful how you structure, so that you minimize calls to the spreadsheet data (I got round this by building a values cache), and scalability is very questionable.

I am equally at home with javaScript or VBA, so putting language aside, VBA is currently more fulfilling and quicker to get things done, although there are increasing capabilities built in to apps script to make it extremely promising.

I am logging the progress of my migration, and the things I come across and the battles to figure out how to minimize structural change (I am trying to see if I can come up with something that would allow dual maintenance on both platforms), so if you are interested, you can follow along here

http://ramblings.mcpher.com/Home/excelquirks/gooscript

Bruce