The case of the broken Microsoft Word VBA application

It was a Microsoft Word (VBA) application written back in 2001.

Essentially what it does is:

user selects a letter type.
the user then enters some customer reference numbers.
the VBA application does an Oracle database lookup to convert those customer reference numbers into names and postal addresses.
which the VBA then uses to “mail merge” into whatever number of letters need to be sent out.

And it was broken.

I had a feeling that writing about patch management policy would come back to bite me (and it did).

“Developing For Office – Options and Trade-Offs”

According to Bruno Terkaly, you have three main choices:

Traditional Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)
Dates back to all the way to the early nineties.
Visual Studio Tools for Office.
Really hit its stride and office 2007. It probably represents the best option moving forward today. It tries to be all things to all people.
The COM Add-In is probably the most powerful, yet the most difficult option of the three.