Let me clear up a very common misconception--Visual Basic is not itself a language. Visual Basic refers to an IDE that Microsoft sells. VBA is the actual language part of the very confusingly named pantheon of Visual Basic tools. VB the IDE is just another program that exposes methods through COM automation and which supports its own version of VBA, just like Office apps do. When people say "Visual Basic", they are technicaly referring to just the IDE when they might well be meaning to refer to the actual language itself. I guess this is what happens when there's no standard for a language...