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I posted the question https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/330802/what-are-the-best-vba-libraries-and-tools which, I learned violated the site rules:

Questions asking us to find or recommend tools, libraries, programming languages, resources (including books, blogs, tutorials, and examples), or projects to undertake are off-topic on Programmers as they attract opinionated answers that won't have lasting value to others. You may be able to get help in The Whiteboard, our chat room.

I understand why questions that ask for recommended tools could lead to opinionated answers that won't have lasting value to others.

But in 2016 most VBA resources online are from a different era and often point to broken links. Clearly this question could have lasting value to others: someone puts "best VBA tools" into their search engine, it pops up and just by clicking on my question they can already learn about a very useful tool called Rubber Duck, that they may not have found otherwise.

The answers might be opinionated/spam, but that can be addressed by the up/downvote buttons, or by flagging them.

Again, I'm not saying that this is a bad rule in general, just asking why discretion can't be exercised for this particular question I asked.

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A question is either a question that belongs or a question that doesn't belong. We, as a community, have decided that some types of questions aren't a good fit for this format. Resource requests are one such type of question that is not a good fit.

Guiding principle can be found in the Good Subjective, Bad Subjective and Real Questions Have Answers blog posts. Questions that generate lists aren't the kind of questions we want because they don't generate the answers that we want. This is a good platform for sharing human knowledge and applying experiences, not aggregating large numbers of links to resources.

We've also had specific discussions on resource requests on Meta here and here and here and here where you can get several reasons why this type of question doesn't work. Each time the top voted posts have been opposed to questions about resource requests. That continues to be the perspective of the community.

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But in 2016 most VBA resources online are from a different era and often point to broken links

I cannot confirm this. Lots of VBA resources online are indeed from a different era, but others are newer and even lots of the old ones are still active.

But it seems you missed what I wrote in a comment below your deleted question: the main problem with a "list of best VBA libraries and tools" is, that there are too many tools and libraries (often in form of COM components) available to put them into a useful list which would fit here on Programmers.SE. Moreover, "best" is often in the eye of the beholder: lots of tools have special use cases, very useful for person X, totally useless for person Y.

One can fill whole books with this topic, and the site FAQ states clearly: if an answer to a question could fill a whole book, the question is too broad. Actually, there are books filled with component descriptions, you simply have to search for "VB Scripting" instead of "best VBA tools" to find some.

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  • Ah, so then my question did come across as too broad. I was asking for libraries/tools that allow you not to reinvent the wheel. A collection of standard UDFs that should've made it into the language, but didn't. That's kind of what the cpearson link I posted does. Here's another example: support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/152288. There is no built-in function to get the dimension count of an array, even though adding one is trivial. So every single programmer who needs it is gonna have to copy-paste that code, turn it into a function that takes an input and returns an integer.
    – user357269
    Commented Sep 12, 2016 at 13:16
  • ^ Whereas it would suffice for someone to fix it once, and then put it in a package for everyone else to use.
    – user357269
    Commented Sep 12, 2016 at 13:19
  • @user357269: I wrote a lot of vba programs, and never missed that function for the dimension count ;-)
    – Doc Brown
    Commented Sep 12, 2016 at 14:32
  • Yeah, I mean Excel is incredibly versatile. I'm using it for data analysis, so I'm doing things that people usually do in R or pandas. I have a lot of functions and they all take arrays/returns arrays, that's why I'm asking about basic array utilities
    – user357269
    Commented Sep 12, 2016 at 14:48
  • I also, just wrote a PrintArray sub to print the array in the immediate window as it doesn't exist in VBA.
    – user357269
    Commented Sep 12, 2016 at 16:21

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