[ChristopherDrum]

That would be Visual Basic for Applications, not the full-featured Visual Basic, if I'm not mistaken. I don't think it's possible to save out standalone executables that can run on machines that don't have Excel (or perhaps other Office apps), since its purpose is for Office automation scripting.

[vic20forever]

You are correct. But, that's about the only difference between VBA and VB. I was a VB developer for 10 years before I wrote my first VBA application (in Excel), and I was surprised when everything I tried to do in VBA just worked(TM).

[pjmlp]

There are plenty more like VB 5 and 6 changed component architecture from VBX, to OCX (COM based), while adding features to do COM development in VB directly.

VB 5 introduced proper AOT compilation, based on VC++ backend, which was further improved in VB 6.

The debugger / REPL experience was much better on VB than VBA.

You cannot really use most VB components in Excel / VBA unless AddIn support is enabled.