You could make a case for using Windows in the 90s (and yeah, I did; the last version of Windows I used was NT in the 90s). After that your time was much better spent on learning and using Linux (downloadable for free).

Visual Basic is a whole steaming pile of crap and you would always have been better learning to use non-corporate, non-proprietary languages and development stacks than wasting your time on that. And calling Office "the number one productivity desktop publishing software" only shows that you have fully drunk the Kool-Aid. More 'office productivity' has probably been lost to Microsoft Word than any other text-processing software on the planet.