Andy Pope posted the two links below in a comment to my previous post:

A while back they added a VBA developer center to the msdn Office site.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/ff688774.aspx

And this article on the Excel developer road map is interesting.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/ff458124.aspx

There seem to be some worthwhile resources there, and the fact that this is a fairly new addition seems to indicate that VBA isn’t quite dead yet.  It’s just a shame it isn’t better integrated with the main MSDN site.

On the other hand, news of other vendors including VBA in their products is not so good.  VBA has been included in Autocad for many years, and also their low cost competitor, Intellicad.  The latest versions of both products come with Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA).  VBA for Autocad can be downloaded as a separate package, but as far as I can see the latest version of Intellicad did not support VBA at all.

I’d be interested to know how many people out there are using VBA/VSTA with these drafting applications.  Is there any backward compatibility with the latest Intellicad?  Is VSTA a good alternative?  Is it a complete integrated system, or do you need Visual Studio as well?

Finally, on the alternative Office front; there is activity at Open Office:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/VBA

VBA interoperability project is a joint Novell & Sun incubator project whose aim is to deliver a way to run Excel and Word macros natively in imported documents.

But

NOTE:  Be aware the idl is not stable, (nor won’t be for the forseeable future be ‘published’) it WILL change, so if you are using a language that has a binary dependency on the interface (like c++ & java) then consider yourselves warned.

Gnumeric also has a VBA project (and has had for several years), but there is little sign of progress:

Scripting. After some vacillation trying to decide between wrapping  Gnumeric’s object model, and providing something that is VBA compatible, the  latter won.  We’ll export an api in C that is compatible with the widely used  VBA interface, and wrap it in several languages (Python, VB.NET, and C# are likely  candidates).

Sounds good, but the heading is “Wish List (long range plans).

And finally finally, with Google Docs and tablet apps it seems that Javascript is the flavour of the month.  Is this the way of the future?  What do you think?