[quote user="Matt Ashby"]Is there some inherent advantage with using tags?[/quote]
Yes! Tags are defined formally in a tag set. Text is just text. MicroStation and programming tools let you do things with tag sets that you can't do with text.
Let's consider a title block as an example. Your title block contains boilerplate information that never changes (e.g. your company address). Data that never change are suitable for display using text elements.
Each drawing has some distinctive data in the title block. For example, drawing_no and revision_no. How do you update revision_no automatically using VBA (or any other programming technique)?
Editing a Title Block
Using tags, you search for the tag whose name is revision_no (or whatever you named it). Then you update the value of that tag to contain the new revision number. If subsequently you want to update the revision, you do the same search again. Because the tag's name never changes and is unique you can always find the same tag to update its value.
Using text, you search for what? There are probably several text elements in your title block, so you have to figure out programmatically how to choose the right one. Write and test a method to find text element containing revision_no and change the text. That works the first time, but what happens when you want to revise the drawing? How can you distinguish between different text elements?
Reporting Drawing Data
Tags lend themselves to data reports. Tag reporting is built into MicroStation. And, as you are aware, you can use VBA to exchange data with an external product such as Excel.
FlexiTable™ also provides a way to exchange tag data with external tools using CSV, XML and Excel data formats.