Recode: Microsoft’s excel is a perfect fit for the mobile web, according to Microsoft’s VP of Developer Experience and Community Engineering, James Dolan.
In a blog post for Recode titled “How Microsoft’s vba excel could be the killer for mobile web,” Dolan said he’s excited by the idea and it’s possible to get there within a few years.
“We’ve been working on the technology for years, and we’re excited about the potential of this technology to help make our desktop applications easier to use for people who are coming from desktop environments that don’t support vba,” he wrote.
“We also think this could be one of the ways we bring together the mobile experience with the desktop experience, which will be a win-win for users and businesses alike.”
The idea of vba, or vb, is to allow you to save and export your code and files in a vba file format.
Microsoft has been working with a small team to create vba formats that are portable across all of its platforms and is currently working with the Open Source Group to make vba as open as possible.
That means that Microsoft is able to publish vba files to the internet for anyone to use.
Microsoft recently announced that it will soon offer the vba format to users, and will also begin selling vb files for non-commercial use in its Edge browser.
“For vba to really become a viable way to run code on mobile devices, we have to make sure we are making the right choice,” Dano said.
“Vba is a very mature technology, and it has the potential to be one solution for a lot of these issues, so we are going to have to think carefully about what the best use case is for the format.”
Microsoft is already using vba for its desktop applications, but it’s also open sourcing the technology so that anyone can use it on their mobile devices.
Microsoft is also using vb for Windows Store apps and Office 365, and recently launched its own vb plugin for developers.
Dolan said that Microsoft could also create vb file formats that work for Chrome on the desktop and for Chrome for Android on mobile, but he was unsure if those formats would be usable on mobile.
“If we were going to use a vb format for the desktop or Chrome, we could probably do that with the help of Google and others,” Dola said.
“But the other things that we’re doing are not for the purpose of using vmbase for the Android platform.
It’s not even for Chrome at this point, but the other issues we’re working on are really about the mobile platform.”
In addition to working with Google and Microsoft, Dolan also said Microsoft is looking to the open source community for support.
“As we work on this we want to make it as easy as possible for people to use vba and we’ll be doing our best to make that as easy for as many people as possible to use,” he said.