The path this tax professional describes is worth paying attention to, not because it is dramatic, but because it is practical. After being advised to avoid VBA, they learned Power Query, found it handled most of their needs, and then made a deliberate choice to keep a small set of VBA macros for the tasks Power Query could not touch. That is not a compromise. It is a mature strategy that more spreadsheet users should adopt.
What makes this approach work is the discipline behind it. The user did not abandon VBA entirely, but they restricted it to simple, repetitive actions that are easy to verify and easy to replicate manually if something breaks. That is the key insight. Complex macros are fragile. A long block of VBA that nobody else understands becomes a liability the moment the person who wrote it leaves the company or forgets how it works. Short macros that do one thing, with built-in checks, are a different proposition entirely. They deliver real return on investment by eliminating human error from routine steps, without creating a maintenance nightmare.
For tax workflows, where accuracy is non-negotiable and deadlines are tight, that balance matters. Power Query handles the heavy lifting of data transformation and consolidation. It is transparent, repeatable, and does not hide logic inside a code editor. But when you need to generate tables from unique values in a data model, or refresh targets without overwriting existing rows, Power Query hits a wall. That is where a short, well-understood macro becomes the right tool, not a relic of a bygone era. The risk is not in using VBA. The risk is in using too much of it, too cleverly.
The lesson here is not about choosing one tool over another. It is about knowing when each tool earns its place. Learn Power Query first, it will do more for your workflow than VBA ever did for most people. Then, if you find a gap that only a few lines of code can fill, write that code, check it, and move on. Keep it simple. Keep it verifiable. That is how you build a tax pack that works reliably today and remains maintainable tomorrow.