ms office - What are the differences between VBA 6.0 and VBA 7.0?

Question

I noticed that Office 2010 comes with Visual Basic for Applications 7.0. However I can't seem to find much documentation on what changes were made. Does anyone have a summary of the changes, or any resources describing the differences?

Answer 1

There's not a whole lot that has changed between VBA6 and VBA7. VBA7 was introduced to support 64-bit versions of both Office and Windows (see below on what those differences are). Here are the key changes:

1. 64-bit support, primarily for API calls. This is both used to make your code work with your OS/Office version as well as others' (i.e. someone on Office 2003/WinXP)

   • If you are on a 64-bit version of Windows, but are on a 32-bit version of Office, you can declare API calls like below. .

     #If Win64 Then
         Declare PtrSafe Function GetTickCount64 Lib "kernel32"() As LongLong
     #Else
         Declare PtrSafe Function GetTickCount Lib "kernel32" () As Long
     #End If

   • If you are on a 64-bit version of Windows, and are on a 64-bit version of Office, you can declare API calls like: .

     #If VBA7 Then
        Declare PtrSafe Function FindWindow Lib "user32" Alias "FindWindowA" ( _
            ByVal lpClassName As String, _
            ByVal lpWindowName As String) As LongPtr
      #Else
        Declare Function FindWindow Lib "user32" Alias "FindWindowA" (ByVal _
            lpClassName As String, ByVal lpWindowName As String) As Long
     #End If

2. To support this, there are:

   • Three new keywords (2 data types and 1 modifier): LongPtr, LongLong and PtrSafe

   • One new function: CLngLng() (i.e. Int64)

   • The new compilation constants as used above: VBA7 and Win64