"he was coding inside Microsoft Office Suite."

Question

This is from a TIME article.

Instead, Vitalik gravitated to the clarity of numbers. At 4, he inherited his parents’ old IBM computer and started playing around with Excel spreadsheets. At 7, he could recite more than a hundred digits of pi, and would shout out math equations to pass the time. By 12, he was coding inside Microsoft Office Suite.

From what I saw on the Internet, The Microsoft Office Suite is a set of programs for common productivity tasks, including a word processing program, a spreadsheet tool, presentation software, an email program and others.

Then, does the part in bold in the above context mean Vitalik used programming languages to create or improve some parts of Microsoft Office Suite?

Answer 1

Microsoft Office includes Visual Basic for Applications ('VBA') which is a programming language and coding environment. It is a version of Microsoft Visual Basic.

VBA is supplied 'inside' Microsoft Office, in the sense that a user has to start an Office application (typically Excel or Access) and then find VBA. It is often used to automate tasks or provide functions not easily obtainable using the standard Office app's features. Many Office users never see VBA and are unaware of its existence. It can be used for general purpose programming and data-processing tasks, although it may be found cumbersome compared with a more general-purpose programming environment.

Visual Basic for Applications