The language structures in OpenOffice.org BASIC are very similar to those used in
Visual BASIC. The methods used for accessing the underlying documents, however, are
vastly different and have essentially no compatibility with each other. Entire books have been written dealing with the differences between Visual BASIC 6 (VB6), Visual BASIC.NET (VB.NET), and Visual BASIC for Applications (VBA). This chapter is only an overview of issues concerning compatibility between the OpenOffice.org BASIC and Visual BASIC. I use VBA, VB6 and VB.NET to refer to the specific versions and VB to generically refer to either or both versions.

To convert VB macros that do not access the underlying documents, my first step is to bring them into OOo and fix the syntax errors. The second step is to remove the errors introduced due to differences in behavior. Thorough testing is required to avoid subtle problems. Significant code changes are required to convert the sections that access the underlying document structures.

VBA is the variant used by Microsoft Office. VB.NET was released after VBA so it is possible that a later version of VBA will follow in the direction of VB.NET. Some of the keywords supported by OOo BASIC and deprecated when moving from VB6 and VBA to VB.NET…

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