Are MS Excel and Visual Basic interchangable?

They are nothing like each other. The similarity is that they are made by Microsoft. You best bet for creating a simulation or RPG is to buy a small IBM AS/400 and stay away from MS entirely.

Excel is an application with a huge amount of functionality available "out of the box." VBA is a watered down (and now deprecated) subset of the Visual Basic programming language.

Rather than interchangeable, it is more useful to consider Visual Basic as an extension of the functionality available in Excel. That is, the macros and subroutines previously written in VBA can now be written in the full-featured Visual Basic .NET programming language.

Specifically for an RPG or simulation, Visual Basic .NET is far and away the better choice, EXCEPT: if you are able to create scenarios in XML, and store them in Excel Pivot Tables. You might consider it.

We are currently writing a tutorial on using Visual Basic .NET to extend the capabilities of Excel. It should be available (free, of course) within a day or two at:

http://www.tekwrytrs.com/

You obviously have no idea what either are, and have no business trying to think about making a simulation game or an RPG.

They are NOT interchangable, Excel is a program, Visual Basic is a programming language. VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is implemented in Excel, but it's hardly as powerful as the real thing. Excel is a powerful program used for statistical analysis and data collection and organization.

I assume by Excel you mean VBA (visual basic running within Excel)...and you are designing a NES Zelda-type RPG on a grid (like the one in Excel).

VB is the winner hands down. With Excel/VBA you'd be stuck with virtually no ability to display images and thus no easy way to identify characters and object in the game (doing this through ASCII text (or trying to shove images in Excel cells and both locate and resize the cells well enough to prevent clutter) would likely be exponentially harder than making and loading simple images).

(even a simple picturebox1.picture = "LoadPicture(x.gif)" call under VB will enable you to change images/characters in maps)...

The only other thing (harder in VB than Excel/VBA) you'd have to track is repositioning the pictures, but that simply means making playerpicX = Xonmap (and reseting xonmap to 0 and incrementing mapgrid by 1 whenever the player hit the right of the screen..until he hits, say, mapgrid > 20 and is at the edge of a world).

Excel would simply handle the scrolling between cells by itself, but having the full control of images should be worth the work of adding these few player tracking equations. Either in VB or excel you'll have to track when players run into each other (and, in most cases, talk, exchange goods, and more). Just have them talk when, more or less, player1x = player2x and player1y = player2y...it's that simple.

The great thing about RPGs is you can make an engaging game without stellar coding skills...but you still need enough pictures and detail so players can understand what's going on and who is who without reading loads and loads of text.

BTW, in response to another answer, in comparison to VB.net (b), VB is nearly as good for simple RPGs (and much easier to learn)...the advantages it has for gaming (IE graphic object inheritance in DirectX, for example, for doing things like rotating a character's arm and rotating the hand relative to the arm..rather than calculating the hand rotation from scratch) are

best suited for very advanced 3D games (think Squaresoft-type quality), not likely to have much impact on simpler RPGs...and if you're going for something that advanced might as well go for c# instead it's both faster and more powerful.

Best luck with your game designing!

They are very different applications. You would not use Excel to build a simulation or RPG - it's basically a spreadsheet. Visual Basic is a development environment.

You can play with Visual Basic Express for free: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vb/

Excel and VB are truly different. Although Excel has a form of Visual Basic in it called Visual Basic for application. If you want more information check out. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/isv/bb190538.aspx

The seen effortless in Excel is extremely seen effortless for purposes (VBA) and is fundamental to Excel whilst Excel if first put in on your laptop. you may get admission to the seen effortless Editor (VBE) by utilizing pressing ALT + F11, or for Excel 2003 and previous, going to equipment > Macro >seen effortless Editor