Is Excel VBA useful for data analysts?

Answer 1

It depends on the type of analysis. If the inquire you are performing cannot be done with formulas, then VBA will easily resolve that task.  In this way VBA acts more like a custom-function. However, if you will be doing other tasks, such as data mining, and the dataset is large, then you might want to consider other applications that can handle that load, and which are specific to that discipline.