Comment by ChristopherDrum
5 days ago
That would be Visual Basic for Applications, not the full-featured Visual Basic, if I'm not mistaken. I don't think it's possible to save out standalone executables that can run on machines that don't have Excel (or perhaps other Office apps), since its purpose is for Office automation scripting.
You are correct. But, that's about the only difference between VBA and VB. I was a VB developer for 10 years before I wrote my first VBA application (in Excel), and I was surprised when everything I tried to do in VBA just worked(TM).
There are plenty more like VB 5 and 6 changed component architecture from VBX, to OCX (COM based), while adding features to do COM development in VB directly.
VB 5 introduced proper AOT compilation, based on VC++ backend, which was further improved in VB 6.
The debugger / REPL experience was much better on VB than VBA.
You cannot really use most VB components in Excel / VBA unless AddIn support is enabled.