this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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Instead of asking why your word processor should have the ability to run arbitrary code, you just inconvenience everyone else on the chance it might. What even.
Yup, it's a shit bandaid to mitigate a shit design. The MS specialty.
Yep.
A constant stream of creating problems and then creating solutions for those problems, which cause more problems....ad infinitum.
Go back and fix the root cause?
Impossible!
Then our 2nd and 3rd tier 'solutions' would have all the 'solutions' based on them not work!
Scripting is great in Excel, but I've never encountered or heard of a use for it in Word.
I used to work at a place where one of their test machines generated a cert in Microsoft Word with test results. They were having their lab technicians manually type in something like eight fields of information to flesh put the cert. I managed to hack together a Word VBA plus Python script to interface with the OpenOffice database I had set up so the techs only had to type in one field, and the script filled in the rest.
It was kind of a monstrosity under the hood, but it worked pretty slickly, and given the available tools I was glad the option existed.
That's partly because the API for manipulating word docs with VBA is incredibly awful.
VBA for Word is bad, but VBA for Excel graphs is worse. At small companies that can't justify the cost of any software outside Office, people will go to great lengths to get Excel to support data analysis. Not being in that situation anymore is one of my top satisfaction items with having changed jobs from a small to a large company.