12. Macros and VBA

12.17 Office Scripts: What They Are and Who Can Use Them

By Ravindra Bagale · Last updated: 6 October 2026

Example first. Every morning Shraddha opens the shared Orders workbook in her browser, makes the header bold, colours the late orders and writes a count in K1. Her VBA macros from this chapter cannot help, because VBA does not run in Excel on the web. Office Scripts are the web-friendly answer: small programs, saved in OneDrive, that you record or write from the Automate tab and can even run from Power Automate while nobody has the file open.

First look at the data (before → after):

Expected result — With an Office Script

About this data: Teaching sample for a fictional shop “HomeNest Supplies”. Figures and names (e.g. Vikram Rao) are made up for this lesson on office scripts what they are and who can use.

Automate › New Script › Create in Code Editor
function main(workbook: ExcelScript.Workbook) { … }
Run

Your first script, line by line

function main(workbook: ExcelScript.Workbook) {
  // Get the Orders sheet by its name
  const sheet = workbook.getWorksheet("Orders");
  // Write a note in K1
  sheet.getRange("K1").setValue("Checked by script");
  // Show a message in the Output pane of the Code Editor
  console.log("Hello from Office Scripts");
}

About this data: Made-up rows so you can copy the pattern for office scripts what they are and who can use. Currencies may use ₹, £, € or $.

What you can do with Office Scripts (from Microsoft's overview)

• Action Recorder: record your clicks and typing and turn them into a script (lesson 12.18).
• Code Editor: edit recorded scripts or write new ones, with if/else and loops that the Excel UI does not have (lesson 12.19).
• Copy as code: record a few actions and copy them as script code without saving a whole script.
• Buttons: add a button to the sheet so colleagues can run a script with one click.
• Sharing: share a script with the people who can open the workbook.
• Power Automate: run a script from a flow, on a schedule or when something happens (lesson 12.20).

Where scripts are saved. A script belongs to you, not to the workbook: it is stored as a file in your OneDrive (Microsoft's file-storage page describes the .osts files in a Documents/Office Scripts folder). That is why sharing a script is a separate step from sharing the workbook.

Limits worth knowing now (Microsoft's platform-limits page): a single read or write between the script and the workbook can carry about 5 MB, and one range can hold at most 5 million cells. For a training sheet of 10 orders this never matters; for 2 lakh rows, read and write in blocks.

Microsoft sources: Office Scripts in Excel (overview); Platform limits, requirements and error messages for Office Scripts.

Practice task (try it before you open the answer):

1. Change the hello script so it writes today's message "Report ready" in K2 instead of K1.
2. Add a second console.log that prints the text "Done".
3. Run it and say where each message appears.

Follow the formula or ribbon steps shown in this lesson (keep values numeric).

Quick revision cards

Three standalone cards. Each one explains the idea with its own example. Scan the QR to open this lesson.