Randall C. Kennedy on Why is Microsoft Office so hard to kill?:
Apart from the popularity of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, Office happens to be the world’s most successful rapid application development platform
… and …
Any attempt to topple Office means declaring war on the army of in-house and third-party ISV developers who have built their livelihoods around the suite’s ever-expanding library of automation and integration APIs. So unless you can provide a viable alternative to VBA, OLE Automation, and the rest of the Office programming model, don’t expect to make much headway in your quest to dethrone the king. The minions are definitely not on your side.
Having done corporate IT consulting before, I have to agree with Randall … it is extremely easy to write code in VBA, and the books on VBA programming aren’t difficult to understand either.