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Microsoft drops VBA in Mac Office 2007
slashdotwriter writes "Macworld features an article stating that the next version of Office for the Mac will not include Visual Basic scripting. From the article: 'Microsoft Office isn't among the apps that will run natively on Intel-based Macs — and it won't be until the latter half of 2007, according to media reports. But when it does ship, Office will apparently be missing a feature so vital to cross-platform compatibility that I believe it will be the beginning of the end for the Mac version of the productivity suite...'"
Given the ease of switching from one OS to another on intel mac, it seems inevitable that the Mac version of Office is doomed. Think Apple knew this and has been preparing for it. iWorks Pro anyone?
Someone get a port of OpenOffice.org up and running natively on MacOS X!
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
This coming right on the heels of the news that OpenOffice will be getting VBA support soon, how convenient!
The problem is for companies which run MS Office on Windows and want to switch. It doesn't matter that there are lots of good scripting languages on the Mac if your company already uses a lot of VBA scripts on Windows.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Interesting decision to be making Word less compatible now as Mac market share grows ... not that VBA is something I particularly want to see proliferate.
Many of them (And many pc users) have put in tons of work making scripts work just right, to do things that they couldn't easily do otherwise. This is the only way those platforms are really programmable by end users (Although with Microsoft's Visual Studio Express and Apple's xCode, this may be ending... if the skills get pushed out somehow.) ... Someone want to try to get a really good importer for VBA working on OpenOffice.org, and a native Mac UI?
Can't help but wonder if this is part of an attempt to get Mac users to resign themselves to installing Windows on a virtual machine in their computer so that they can run a less hobbled version of MS Office.
Well, here goes the platform where all of the "real" Mac OS X viruses are born. Now only remains concepts and supposedly fud viruses.
I think the problem is that some users have code that depends on VBA, and they want it for compatibility reasons. Cedega is (somewhat) popular, not because DirectX is superior to Linux alternatives, but because many computer games depend on it.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
Nobody will notice that VBA scripting is missing except the virus writers, and those guys don't use Macs anyway.
that sucks - i dont know if anyone else has had to put together a very larger power point on a mac book pro, but it is freaking slow. When the file hits 70megs it starts to hit a crawl.
its a pain in my ass
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
And in other news, Open Office is getting that same feature, for which contribution Novell is being roundly denounced for conspiring with Microsoft to bring about the end of open-source software.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Before I get flamed by all the Mac fanboys. I just want to say that keeping the small portion of Mac business users happy isn't a priority for Microsoft. Maintaining legacy support it very difficult from version to version, and this is such a low priority I can't see anything being done in the future. Office for Mac won't stop anytime soon however, despite what this article says, because 90+ percent of Mac users won't even notice a difference.
Obviously, it will be SOOO much more difficult for Microsoft to port VBA, now that Apple is running an Intel architecture instead of PPC!
Entourage is a great mail program, unless you want to use it to talk to an Exchange server. As an Exchange client, it sucks.
I have clients who still run Classic exclusively so they can use Outlook 2001. The Exchange support in Entourage has been so shameful for so long (they've taken YEARS and still haven't achieved feature parity with Outlook 2001) that I really have a hard time believing it's not a deliberate move to thwart Mac use in the enterprise.
The same goes for this move. Microsoft makes a TON of money selling Mac Office, and with the Mac market growing and Microsoft standing to see a Mac Office sales increase as a result, it's not like they can't afford the development costs.
These actions only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. There's no other logical explanation.
~Philly
funny, i remember reading the same thing here sometime back:/ 1232239
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/08
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
This is old news -- it showed up on a MS developer blog a couple of months back.
The interesting part is that VBA is not fully supported on the 64-bit Office for Windows, and is in fact depricated, which traditionally means that no further imporovements will be made and further use is discouraged.
Don't believe me? Go search Microsoft's Office site.
VBA is a curse from Microsoft causing all sorts of trojan risks, until it's dropped. Then it's a serious problem. Figures.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
First of all, this news is over fives months old, and has been widely covered and known about since then. MacBU's Erik Schwiebert has a very detailed post and followup (also mentioned in the article) about exactly why Microsoft is dropping Visual Basic in Mac Office. The bottom line is that it was a difficult decision, and anyone who reads the posts will be able to understand why the decision was made.
The people at Microsoft who work within MacBU really do care, and really do take pride in their work. But overall, Microsoft seems to be making moves - decisions not made within MacBU, or decisions forced on MacBU because of resource allocations - that are strategically designed to hurt the Macintosh platform, but not appear to be doing anything overtly.
Examples:
- Killing Mac IE the day Safari was introduced even though Mac IE 6 was well underway and had been in development for over a year and was about to hit beta.
- Never releasing Access, Project, or Visio for the Mac platform even though enterprises (particularly academic institutions) have been increasingly demanding it for years. Microsoft's response? "Our customers don't want these products."
- Killing Windows Media Player for Mac, and making it look like going with the Flip4Mac QuickTime Windows Media codec is doing Mac users a favor, when Flip4Mac will never support Windows Media DRM, which Microsoft views as key to their future Windows Media strategy, leaving Macs unsupported (whether DRM is a good or bad thing is irrelevant to this point).
- Killing Virtual PC for the Mac when the Intel transition was announced after initially committing to support it, even though Microsoft was probably in one of the best positions to quickly release a virtual machine version of Virtual PC (can you imagine Connectix killing Virtual PC after the Intel transition was announced? They'd be jumping for joy!), and then subsequently making Virtual PC free (on Windows).
- Killing Visual Basic in Mac Office, which will make it DOA in many enterprise/corporate environments whose documents depend on VB scripting.
I could go on and on. These are all expert strategic moves, not by MacBU but by Microsoft at large, designed to hurt the Macintosh platform as much as possible while still appearing to be "friendly" to the platform (by continuing to release Office).
Fortunately, with Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop, and the forthcoming VMWare Fusion, new Mac users are feeling increasingly comfortable with Mac purchases, because they know that they can run Windows if they really need to, but often find they don't need it as much as they thought they did. For many, it's a security blanket to get them over the hump, and for others it does enable them to run those Windows (or other x86 OS) applications they need or want to smoothly and efficiently. In many academic/research enterprise environments, many people can't see a reason to get anything OTHER than Mac hardware now (especially for laptops), as it can essentially run anything. And in an environment where an institutions own IT capability will "support" things like Boot Camp usage, it's not a difficult decision to make.
Microsoft's maneuvering will ultimately be futile. Windows "won" the "desktop war" long ago. But now, as with Firefox, people are realizing that there are real, viable alternatives that might actually be better than the status quo.
Honestly, if they left VBA in we'd be questioning M$ for persisting to include a platform that has been notoriously insecure.
Considering that Office 2007 is including InfoPath and Groove as alternatives to distributing forms one has to believe that M$ first move away from VBA is not their last. Frankly having done many Office automation projects over the years I can say that VBA is quite a programming limitation, difficult to scale and prone to memory leaks.
As for alternatives, I have yet to find a management-type who wouldn't leap at the offer of replacing a stodgy, circa-1995 automated Word document with some sort of web-based application instead. For that matter, you can be outside of the M$ camp entirely by rolling out the replacements in PHP, JSP, Struts or FlashMX.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
This is also part of a trend to limit solutions available on the Mac platform. Over the past 10 years, the products that MS sells for the mac has shrunk. In particular, they buy cross platform products and kill them on the Mac Platform. Virtual PC and Foxpro are two examples. Connectix would have create a version for the Intel Mac. I believe the only reason we have MS Office for the Mac is because MS Office is a mac product, and was only ported to MS Windows.
It is becoming more clear that the casual user should use OO.org
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Maybe nobody remembers, but back when Steve Jobs first announced the Intel switch, he also announced a 5-year agreement with Microsoft where MS committed to continuing to release Office for the Mac. Surely Apple's lawyers weren't stupid enough to let MS kneecap the product (which is exactly what it's done) and get away with it, right?
Not to mention that those "expert strategic moves" you mention are also "illegal anticompetitive moves" when carried out by a monopoly convicted of abusing its position, such as Microsoft.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
So apparently Apple has every reason to make iWork '07 a "no holds barred" release. I expect to see a powerful spreadsheet app and probably some nifty database or drawing thing to make Access or Visio, respectively, look clunky. Given how well Apple handled the transition from IE to Safari, they certainly have a good contingency plan for the gutting/cancelation of Office.
I've always found it ridiculous how Mac users don't like running cross-platform applications under X. X is a standard for windowing on *nix systems, even if it's old and a little broken. If it's such a big deal, why doesn't Apple integrate Aqua and X better? And in terms of printing, Mac OS X uses CUPS, which is the same thing most people use on Linux.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
I would think the real problem is that VBA on Office is an excellent vector for hackers. Perhaps removing it from all versions of Office would be a good thing. It would probably help businesses out in the long run as spreadsheet macros are horribly inefficient means for executing business logic. Add to that the auditing issues surrounding laws like Sarbanes Oxley, and macros become unusable anyways.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I think this sucks.
Note that this was reported months ago, August 7, 2006, to be exact.
Microsoft kills VirtualPC, VB for Mac
Here's the arstechnica.com forum discussion about it (started on August 7, 2006), with lots of pissed off users:
MS Killing VB in Next Version of Office for Mac
Here are two blogs (Aug 8 and 9) by MacBU devs Erik Schwiebert and Rick Schaut, trying to explain this decision.
Erik Schwiebert - Saying goodbye to Visual Basic
Rick Schaut - Virtual PC and Visual Basic
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
If the specs are going to be 'published' wouldn't it make sense for Apple to brush up on their import/export features in iWork? I don't believe that these things come as a shock to a firm as paranoid as Apple sometimes seem to be, and it seems like MS are on a death ride to nowhere anyway. Killing MacOffice makes no business sense, but Microsoft are organisationally knackered, and Apple can't really be portrayed as the fall guys any more.
This is all pretty typical, actually... I'm sure that what is going through the minds of Ballmer and the marketingdroids in Redmond is that Apple is becoming a threat and they have a weapon. The shift of Apple computers to intel processors may be seen at Microsoft as an opportunity; Try to convince Apple users to run Windows. How? Make sure office now SUCKS on "OS X", then the Apple user will be forced to dual-boot or virtualize a copy of Windows to run Office.
Personally, I could care less. Office hasn't changed in 10 years, with the exception of things like clippy and file formats, and the old stuff runs fine under Rosetta.
If you get an emailed word document that is saved in some new file format designed to make you upgrade, just send the mail back and ask the sender to save in the correct format. Don't let the upgrade virus take control.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Can you do the same things with AppleScript as VBA? Isn't VBA more integrated? Would a become a millionaire if I made a convenient program that ports the code in non-obtrusive fashion? Is it really necessary that I have to phrase everything as a question?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
If this becomes the case, hopefully WINE style emulation will start becoming popular in those kind corporate environments. It would be atrocious to get Windows licenses for all of those Intel Macs... Everybody else can use Neooffice / MS Office Mac.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
If there's no VBA, how are we supposed to write our worms?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Does anyone still think that the appeals court was right in reversing Judge Jackson's decision? Did anyone expect that Microsoft would behave any differently? I would hope the oversight committee is paying attention, but they're probably they're too busy enjoying a new Ferrari or two. Seriously, it's been said for years that had there been no Apple, Microsoft would have found it necessary to invent one ... but that assumed Apple's market share stayed insignificant. If Apple starts to erode Microsoft's customer base in any substantial way, Microsoft will take steps. This is probably just the first salvo.
But yeah, VBA is something the world should be able to live without.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Are they will so willing to show people they don't need VBA in Office?
I use windows and debian linux myself. I am sick to death of msft's bullsh!t, and I have switched entirely to ODF.
As you may know, there is an ms-office plugin for ODF, but there is not a way to read ms-office-2007 file formats on Mac. And there will not be a way until, at least, late march.
Just wondering what you guys think.
One is to translate VBA in Office to Applescript and the second one is to translate Applescript to VBA.
Damn, I don't know either of them and I am so busy reading /. that I don't have time to learn, otherwise, I am going to be rich.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
MS flexes it's all powerfull VBA code by holding out on Mac, I guess they don't like the commercial about running office.
Call to arms!
let's change the standard to something Open and not controlled by one company. (Evil or Not)
I'd Tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past
Cedega is (somewhat) popular, not because DirectX is superior to Linux alternatives, but because many computer games depend on it.
Linux has an "alternative" to DirectX? DirectX generally kicks the pants off of OpenGL performance-wise, and graphics accelerators aren't built with anything else in mind.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Just tell your CIO "Hey we can reimplement this as a web based form application that will do the same thing but in a centralized and easily maintained location that all employees regardless of OS can utilize... AND we can generate stats, reports from those stats AND ensure that all employees are using the latest most up to date calculations."
Problem solved. Long live the Intranet.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Does anyone know if Endnote integration is done through VBA? If so it will really cripple academic computing as well as enterprise. I mean we can keep using ppc word, but it would be nice...
Seriously, I haven't seen many VBA scripts in Word or Excel documents. They might have existed a few years ago, but now we have MySQL, PostgreSQL for free or Sybase, Oracle and a slew of other databases that can contain more data better and for automation we have PHP, Java, Python and Ruby. I have seen once or twice a VBA script in an Excel document and the fact that it was utterly bad scripting made me aware that you don't let bookkeepers create scripts but you should have real programmers take care of that.
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This is terrible!
The only time I use VBA automation is when a PC user sends me a Word attachment with a macro virus and I open it.
We must have cross-platform virus compatibility! If we don't have Word macro viruses, what will be left for antivirus programs to protect Mac users from? The Mac antivirus market will collapse!
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Documents containing VBA sent to Mac users have always caused problems. It seems the VBA found in the Mac version of Office is not totally compatible with Office 2000, 2002 & 2003. Now we can just say "Mac Office doesn't support VBA at all".
Just to put the entire Microsoft collapsing thing into a context that includes reality:
- Microsoft is making over a billion dollars in cash profit each month (not revenue - profit). This number increases every month.
- Microsoft's year over year revenue increased 15% in the last year reported
- Microsoft has achieved saturation in the desktop market, and their server revenue and share has been increasing every quarter.
- Microsoft is now owns the PDA market and is fast taking over the Smartphone market and is making signifant inroads in the embedded markets
- Microsoft's combined web properties have the highest number of visitors (over twice the nearest competitor Yahoo)
- Microsoft has the #1 best selling next generation game console
In short, Microsoft knows how to execute a long term business plan. They aren't going to collapse under the weight of wishes of a lawyer.
Would it not be like the community to band together and create a open source addon/plugin to reproduce the functionality of the VBA scripting. How hard would it be to simply reverse engineer the parser from 2004 as a stopgap measure. Then all we need to do is either rise up and call for an addon or to write it ourselves. It saddens me to see such a thing. I think it would be poetic justice if we made an open source VBA clone and it helped bring more people into linux and mac. Apple could contribute some help and then OpenOffice could port it into its self and make it a better competitor. We will have to see how this plays out.
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
I dunno what the fuss is about MS Office 2007 not running natively on the Intel Macbooks. 2004 doesn't run natively on my Macbook and I've never encountered any problems (I only noticed this a few weeks ago). Apple's PPC emulation is pretty damn rock solid. Well maybe it will if MS goes and does weird shit with 2007 that ends up ramping up the system requirements (perish the thought with MS).
Erik's detailed post also explains why MS is saying that the native 64-bit versions of Office for Windows aren't going to get VBA either (just VSTO).
From a developers' perspective its easy to see why they're making this change since it deletes a custom language compiler from the Office source code in favor of using one maintained by the compiler team.
But, as usual (c.f. the way Mac Messenger has to live without file transfer abilities while waiting for the Windows corporate and personal versions to finish moving to a new approach), the MS Mac BU isn't lifting a finger to help its product's users through the migration while the Windows users are being hand-held through it.
VBA is quite powerful within Office and can be used to make great bespoke software solutions. Loosing that functionality could be quite risky for Microsoft.
Not that it's a problem, of course. Businesses don't often leap into new technology. We've just completed a migration of 120,000 NT workstations to XP for a government branch in the UK, just as Vista is released and Microsoft Office 2007.
I couldn't agree more.
For two years I had to enter my department's annual budget into an Excel spreadsheet just dripping with macros.
What a nightmare! Errors in the macros could not be fixed. Errors in the preloaded budget codes could not be
fixed. Errors that I made could not be caught. Some actions were irreversible. Blech.
The process was then converted to a web-based application. 1000% improvement. All prior problems were solved.
Client side support issues dissolved away. New functionality was added.
Elimination of VB will be a step forward for information technology.
It still beats the pants off of Word in my opinion, at least at standalone word processing, but Microsoft beat it with monopolistic business tactics, and stressing interoperability in a corporate environment.
Corel once had ports of WordPerfect for the Macintosh and Linux. It probably cannot hope for more than a small share of the Windows marketplace, but the Mac OS and Linux are a much wider field. It should try to port its next version to those platforms.
Open Office is getting that same feature, for which contribution Novell is being roundly denounced for conspiring with Microsoft to bring about the end of open-source software.
If the "feature" is free, no one will denounce them for it. When I see it in the Debian repositories, I'll know it's free and commend them for the contribution. Apple users will thank them too. If they had to sign NDA's and can't distribute it, then it's just another M$ owned prop for a non-free annoyance that should be left to die. If they are using such non free props to promote their distribution, they have indeed sold the free software community out.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I have yet to find a management-type who wouldn't leap at the offer of replacing a stodgy, circa-1995 automated Word document with some sort of web-based application instead.
That's a relief because VB sucks. The article's budget planning by spreadsheet sounded like an absolute nightmare to me. VBA, like VB itself, had more versions than Windows itself and each new version broke the old scripts. The scripts in the last fortune 100 company I worked for would be fixed by a student intern. The idea behind using PCs in the first place was to give workers power and flexibility in their jobs so they could get what they wanted without an IT guy. It did not work out that way because the workers were too busy getting their jobs done to keep up with ever changing shit like VBA. Deployment of decent collaboration tools is the way forward and that's all happening outside the M$ world.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Can it import PowerPoint documents? There is nothing worse than migrating to a "vastly superior" product only not to support the most used format in the office place.
Went and found myself a trial version and it looks like the answer is yes. I would imagine this is one of the making MS wonder whether there is any need to continue their effort.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
How dare you compile your OS to run on cheap hardware!
How is this a surprise?
The development of an apparently open file format with OpenXML, with more and more limited compatibility with Microsoft Office on Windows into the bargain.
You kid, but I've come to depend on VBA as a study tool. With it I've been able to program tools such as this to help with study and work. This fact coupled with the rumor my physics instructor has been spreading about VBA for Windows being next if this works out well might be enough to make me switch over to OO for good.
For under a $100 you can get a word processor (Pages) and slideware application (Keynote) that are in many ways much better than the competitions. There are still a few issues with Pages still but it already is easier to write high quality technical documents in Pages. The only thing really missing at this point is a spreadsheet application which I have heard is in the works.
I think the beta reaction instead of "wah, WTF?", should be what percentage of users actually make use of the VBA portion of office? Also, isn't Microsoft slowly migrating to C# as their high-level language of choice?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
My understanding is that VBA (event the version in Office2007) is largely based on VB6. Given the fact that Office2007 is a huge install already, why not include the .Net runtime environment with the install and move VBA into a .Net type language. While not completely backwards compatable with VB6/VBA, it would be a lot easier to upgrade a macro or VBA-app to VB.net than to something completely differet like C# because the learning curve from VBA/VB6 to VB.net is a lot easier and there are already a bunch of upgrade "wizards" to move VB6 code to VB.net. Once the macro language is moved to .Net, then the problem becomes implementing a .Net runtime environment to something besides windows and it looks like the Mono project already has done a lot of the heavy lifting in figuring that out. It seems that creating MacOs bindings for the forms is do-able, since Mono has already done similiar work with GTK.
.Net is that a cross-platform runtime environment (e.g. Mono) that allowed running Office on any platform would propbably eat into sales of Windows, since Windows and Office are mutually supporting monopolies.
The only reason I would think that MS would not want move Office to
had things continued on the course they were on, the lower court would likely have had to replace the sentence of breaking up microsoft with a less harsh one - perhaps opening up library source, or documenting hidden APIs, or similar.
unfortunately for everyone except microsoft, in 2000 we had us an election and, thanks in at least a small part to Gates' financial support, in 2001 the DoJ was directed to make the case go away by the new administration.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Hey, guys....I read through the developer's blog. There's a section in there which he tells non-programmers to skip, where he goes through the gritty details of why porting VBA is impossible. Here's a quick summary if you can't seem to sift through the tech-speak but still want to know what's going on.
.exe file is formatted. Finally, the author kinda passes blame along, saying he just inherited the whole program from his predecessors, who no longer work at Microsoft.
First of all, a lot of the code that actually comprehends the VB programming language is actually tangled up in the GUI code. Second, the code has huge blocks of code that are written in processor-specific assembly. That means that they either have to fundamentally redesign the entire product or maintain separate versions for all of the different processors they support (32-bit PPC, 32-bit x86, 64-bit x86). Third, he rules out the possibility of porting the windows version of VBA over to the mac because the damn thing actually makes assumptions about how the actual
When I first read the article, I thought it stunk to high heaven of Microsoft trying to gimp Apple. I still believe this is going to be a huge headache for Apple users who rely on extensive cross-compatibility, but unless that blog is a large-scale, deliberate, malicious fabrication, VBA is really an ungodly mess of an application.
Who would have guessed?
Well, how in the world are people going to write viruses for Office?
Oh, wait, I forget, OSX doesn't suffer from viruses.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
For the most part on these things it's not us (Mac users) that have a problem with having a feature missing it usually comes down to soneone from the outside not accepting the fact that we cannot use thier stuff because we do not have that feature. If mac BU want to make headway they do not need to talk to Mac users about how to handle the loss of VB in Office but consult with the WINDOWS Office unit on how to handle that other CURRENT versions of Office will not have VB support. THAT is where a lot of the problems and friction eminate.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
So with Mac Office fatally crippled (Most documents I get these days have macros in them. I have no clue why, but I get the anti-virus warning when I open them), I'll be forced to go to something that can open that crap.
With Parallels or BootCamp, I -can- run Windows and Windows Office on my Mac. But at what cost??? Dell pays peanuts for Windows/Office on each machine it ships. Me, I'll have to buy retail. Office XP Pro costs $300 (I just priced it out for -this very reason-.) That'a an appalling amount of money for (bad) software. Office on Windows retail probably costs a similar amount. Corporate IT tells me "Oh, we -never- buy software from Microsoft. We always get our machines equipped by the OE(hardware)M."
Good strategy if you're a Microsoft stockholder.
But the previous comments about the antitrust "oversight" of Microsoft applies here, and I find Office a much more insidious monopoly than Windows ever was...
dave
I'm actually wondering about this decission and if it has far more to do with Mac's unwillingness to work with Microsoft to support .NET apps on their platform, deciding instead to only support JavaVM and their own systems.
.NET programer I had a chance to work with Office 2007 and one of the first things I noticed was that VBA was being superceeded in the suite by a "VB.NET" system instead. Not a big deal for me, or most VBa users since the format, structures and commands are fairly simliar. But VB.net allows more interconnectivity and function than the older VBa engine ever could. ((Yes that's good and bad when you consider macrovirus issues))
.NET support (and yes there are .NET engine for certain *nix distros and ones that support WinForms) So please comment, I'd like to hear any reasonable comments that do not contain the usual "Why would they want to do that? Support something MS created? That's just giving MS more control" or the other "Mac is just better... install linux...etc comments." but a real valid comment on the thought.
Why am I thinking that? As a
Anyway, just a thought, and I'm interested to hear what other people think. I know that porting the VBa engine in Office 2007 would have been much simpliar for the programing group if Mac had
Thanks Mac people!
OpenOffice is working on an Aqua version that can run natively on OSX. I suppose that will run faster than NeoOffice.
From their mission statement:
For me, NeoOffice works, and I've been using it since more than a year. The big problem here is not NeoOffice, but Java Swing I believe, as NeoOffice is java-based. Java is slow on the Mac, and that should be fixed! Try to use Eclipse, then NeoOffice is lightning speed.
I didn't say it would live without it, just that it should. I know what you're saying, and it's true. On the other hand, if we are to wean ourselves from Microsoft products (should we, collectively, decide that we need to do so) it would be in our best interests not to have too large an investment in Microsoft glue code. Looks like your outfit would be in trouble in that case though.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
When this news first came out several weeks ago I think I remember the macBU team listing AppleScript as the new preferred method of scripting rather than VB. The current Applescript reference guide for Excel alone runs 462 pages, and contains hundreds of classes and methods. I've Applescripted Excel on occasion with great success, and converting the actions to Automator actions is fairly easy. I think that other than the obvious, potentially huge, burden of converting VBA to Applescript, I think that in the long run the move could end up strengthening the interoperability between MacOS and the Office suite.
Yep, or use good ol' LaTeX.
The packages "beamer" and "prosper" are very good for presenations. And for reports, letters, articles or an occasional PhD thesis LaTeX is still far ahead of Word and OpenOffice.
But whatever you use exporting a presentation to pdf is always a good idea and I don't understand why not more people do it.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
I work for a Microsoft shop but at home I only run OS X. I find Entourage to be far, far better Exchange client than Outlook 2003 which we've standardized on at work. To illustrate just one example, Entourage can connect to multiple Exchange servers where Outlook can only connect to one. Is that a brain-dead design decision or what? I can't even begin to conjecture what Microsoft had in mind when deciding that Outlook users would only ever desire to connect to a single Exchange server.
Once Apple previewed Keynote, the writing was on the wall for Office for OS X. When Pages debuted, that only cemented the decision. The only thing keeping new releases on the drawing board is the settlement between Apple and Microsoft that guaranteed development of Office for the Mac for a certain number of years. Once the clock runs out on that agreement, there will be no no Office for Macs.
As far as databases go, don't forget that it was Apple that produced Filemaker Pro. Look for a re-acquisition of Claris sometime in the next couple of years.
What will kill Apple, though, is the demise of Entourage. Once Microsoft is no longer providing an Exchange client, there will be a powerful incentive to not go Mac. Hopefully Apple will step up to the plate.
X is a standard for windowing on *nix systems
Think about this for a second. Do you think the people who are interested in "the standard" rather than what they think is best would be using OSX at all? X is designed to work well for people who like Unix apps (Darwin users). Its also designed to offer some level of support for an integrated environment. But that's far short of a mac app.
I'm rather confused by the statement that the next version of Office for Mac won't be Intel-native. This directly conflicts with what Microsoft has said (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/default.aspx?pid=mac IntelQA).
Funny thing is is that I FORGOT to include that. All that I wrote, and I thought of and forgot that.
But, I imagine that if IBM and Hansoft even agreed to work with SO/OOo, they would demand a total rewrite, no doubt about it.
I noticed that CompuUSA sells StarOffice, but I don't know how much it moves/alters inventory. It's been hanging from the endcap for maybe a year that I've noticed.
I don't known what "best code" SO folds into SO from OOo, but if any speed gains were to be had, I'm sure we'd get them as part of the incremental upgrades to OOo, unless Sun is holding those back to attempt increasing sales of SO...
============ Different topic....
BTW,
JUST yesterday (or maybe it was Friday) I recalled the other thread about Novell/ms. I think that ms does not need to outright assault/kill Linux/FOSS immediately. Someone mentioned that ms wouldn't care that Linux/FOSS created good software as long as what people use is the stuff that **ms** puts out. So, what if ms DOES release "ms office for Linux"? I think, now, to avoid Win4Lin, VMware, and other apps, a LOT of businesses just MIGHT use ms-warez ON Linux, just for stability, and streamlining their apps.
Now, Linux the server/desktop would still survive, but mshaft would put a big dent in the outflow of FOSS apps if ms could stem the flow of FOSS uptake. This would hurt a LOT of people, maybe even me. I want to release as a combination of GPL/proprietary (free/non-free) license an app I've been building for a few years. But, my mind thought of all this when I was perusing my licensing options.
==============
Back on topic....
I wonder how much of Apple's customer base actually USES ms VBA scripting. I'd presume that ms did some intense polling and decided the number was not large enough to support, or just large enough to hurt in order to hurt Apple.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I really liked Word Pro back in 1997. I used it several years. It had many useful features. But when I changed to Windows 2000 it crashed all the time. So I changed to Office - simple as that. The fact was that the crashes I had with Windows 98 were so frequent, that changing to Office was a small price.
Anyway, I'm on a Mac now, using NeoOffice for more than a year. I don't use Office anymore on the Mac. NeoOffice is slow - no question about that. But it's workable. If you put many pictures in a document, then it's really slow. If you do difficult layout stuff, same story.
NeoOffice looks a bit like Mozilla did several years ago. Then came Phoenix, the browser only version, now better known as Firefox. Mozilla was a slow browser. Firefox is clean and fast (well maybe not if you install a ton of extensions - but that's your own fault).
And I really would like IBM (more than Apple) to jump in and help them out. But on the other hand, isn't Sun supposed to do that?!?!
Word will become a text editor?
Is this something that Office for the Mac has now or was it just a new planned feature that isn't going to happen after all?
If the latter.... so what?
If the former, how many people actually know and use it?
Pardon my ignorance, but isn't the entire point of a graphics subsystem to provide widgets? If X isn't doing it then just what the heck is X for?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I've had MS-Word vanish many times in mid-type on several customer machines.
To get OO-Writer to do the same, I have to be running a cruddy video driver for an odd card, & seg-fault Writer via that.
I alse regularly use & recommend Writer for recovering "broken" MS-Word documents.
On a number of occasions, I've had time-critical documents shipped from the US or UK arrive unreadable in MS-Office, but read & edit fine & dandy under OpemOffice. I also ship documents in several forms, & a few times have had the recipient recover text from a Writer PDF file and use it where the Word DOC file arrived broken.
I have not had an ODT document arrive broken, ever, and it's very rare for a Writer DOC to break.
This has scraped documents in closely under deadlines a number of times.
I don't see this safe method as being competed with by a pay-for system which has demonstrated its instability, and forces me to use another OS just to run it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yeah, that pretty much sums up 10 years of VBA for the corporate world. And because it's not "in Debian", it should not exist. Very good - I love how these posts get modded up.
People like you with that extremist jihad mantra attitude remind me of things like these. No one will ever wear that, but it's lots of fun to strut around in it and you can talk about it over a dry martini afterwards. The designer will end up in the clank, and hopefully in a few years no one will remember that even existed.
According to one MacBU developer's blog, the Mac version of OS X will have support for basically the same object model used in Office for Windows, but will only lack support for the VBA language itself. In its place, developers can use AppleScript or other languages to script Mac Office.
So what are the chances that someone like Real Software will step in with a Mac Office plugin to allow it to handle VBA scripts?
Uhm, wasn't it commented that VBA will be removed from the Windows version of Office as well... Pretty sure Peter O. made this statement a month or two ago...
I loathe and despise Word for Windows. It is slow, almost unusably buggy, has the most awkward and painful interface I know of (much, much worse w/ 2007, from what I've seen of it and IE7) and crashes constantly to boot. I've never had much exposure to the rest of Office but what I know of it sounds the same or worse. Oddly enough, the latest version of Word for Mac I've used (2001 IIRC) was dramatically superior to the then-current Windows version; maybe a reaction to the Word 6 fiasco and subsequent backlash.
.doc format.
Given all that, why would anyone, anywhere touch Office with a 10 foot pole? Because it's MS; because management idiots buy it, not users; because it's possible, with enough expensive training, to make it work well enough to keep things creaking along. And, of course, because every business document out there is in the misbegotten
I should be thrilled at the prospect that Neo or OOo might get a well deserved boost from this; I should be excited that the new XML formats, as atrociously designed as they are, make interop more possible (harder to block at least) than ever before.
Instead I'm thinking: my company provides me full MSDN, including Office development. MS is planning to provide pretty much the same object model in the new Office, except that it will be exposed by Applescript instead of VBA. What would be the market prospect for a VBA / Applescript translator?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And only after another virus was circulating that affects Excel for mac as well as Excel for windows.
The ONLY thing on my mind when I am worrying about computer viruses is Microsoft Office. I wonder how MS feels about my making that mental connection with their brand?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
They announced this a while ago. Of course denying that this is really the end of Office for the mac. What amazes me is that the Macintosh Business Unit refuses to recognize this, and that this is the end of the line for probably a lot of their jobs. I would rather they stripped out almost every other "new" feature, just updated the old version... and let the code be messy.
But, of course, they instead take out a vital part for cross-platform capability.
And Open Office? What a joke. MS Office at least took multiple generations to become bloated... I wonder what OpenOffice's excuse is?
Just another reason not to upgrade to the latest MSOffice. The only difference is that this time it's the Macs that are affected.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Besides Office is still not Services aware, and that removes part of the purpose of having a Mac.
If they now leave VBA out, will there be any reason left to buy MS Office instead of downloading the free NeoOffice?
But seriously... In light of the Unix-based core, and ease of portability of wine (see the darwine project), and the ability to run Microsoft Office for years now, why not just buy the Windows version of Microsoft Office and run it under OS X using Darwine? Sure, it's not ideal, but if Apple increased contribution to the project and put it's support behind running Microsoft Office 2007 on OS X, I think that should be about all the comfort businesses and enterprises need to insure they could move forward with OS X. You'd be guaranteed 100% compatibility with the Windows version, Access would be there, and life would be happy again. Oh, and added benefit - it's already Intel native, so performance should be pretty darned good (even better than office 2004), as wine, as we all know, is not an emulator. ;-)
Just be glad your office environment doesn't mandate the use of WordPerfect 12.
It makes Word look like a walk in the park. UGH!
With the first link, the chain is forged.
For what it's worth, there was one occasion when I was given a bit of VBA code and told to make it work for Macs. It would not run as-is in Office 2004. I looked through the code and couldn't figure out much. I have no experience with VBA but I know enough about various other languages that I can usually figure out what's going on in an unfamiliar language but not this time. I called up the developer and got a description of what the program was supposed to do and then wrote it from scratch in AppleScript. I was able to do everything that I needed to do and my AppleScript turned out to be much more trouble free than the VBA script on Windows. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's the fault of VBA itself. I don't think the guy who wrote that particular VBA code is that good a programmer. Not everyone has an AppleScript developer handy, which I suppose is the problem with loosing VBA support. My point is that it isn't trivial to run VBA in existing Mac versions of Office anyway. At minimum, you need a small AppleScript wrapper. AppleScript in Office 2004 has a "do VBA script" command which is supposed to let you run code from Windows but it didn't work in for the code I was given. One of the issues is that you have to escape certain characters for it to work and that, alone, would not have been trivial for the quantity of code I had to go through. Even a small sample of code put into a subroutine, with all the escapes correct, did not work for me. If there's another way to run VBA code in Office 2004, I don't know about it.
I am slightly at a loss on where to begin to even consider this pointless post. You are probably the WORST Mac user I have EVER come in contact with. Normally, I really like Mac users, they are cheerful people and you do a tremendous disservice to them. You are the type of user that the Windows community would love to get rid of (cutting 90% of the spam/viruses), the Linux community could do well with out (removing a horrible taste for new users on support forums, and increasing adoption), and according to my Mac buddies over here, a breed once thought to be extinct. So let me switch over to my pissed mode.
:-P
"What cross-platform development? I am a full-time J2SE/J2EE developer and..."
First, I think someone else already has posted the faults of Java development on Mac and I completely agree with him, so go read that. Second, you can do "Java development," consider yourself a "cross-platform developer", and yet you consider Linux a "reconfiguration and dependency hell?" Linux when compared to the other unix systems out there is a breeze. You run a command to install an application from a remote source and then configure it to your liking. See if it's that simple on an Enterprise level application for people like BellSouth, Comcast, or Ford. Third, "cross-platform" development is more than just using an almost close to perfect cross-platform language. It is a way of developing software. Java is just one simple and usually effective method of it. I program in C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Perl, Tk, Ruby, on occasion, PHP and a few other unmentionable older languages which I haven't used recently. So don't get all high and mightily about cross-platform development with little old Java, that would be baby steps. Java has many limits and situations where it is NOT the best fit, and if you were a really good Java developer, you would know that.
Objective-C, hummm, now there is a language that everyone HAS to learn. There is too much stuff out there to learn and too little time to learn it. Between C and C++, ObjC kind of falls off the chart behind a lot of other things when it comes to priorities. It has a return on investment that is smaller than the other options that I could spend resources on.
FYI: Obviousness (noun): 1: being in the way or in front; 2: easily discovered, seen, or understood
I guess you need to go update that Mac dictionary (my bad Mac users ^_^)
But you wanted an example.... Humm... ok, here is one that comes popping up. The one button mouse follows the Mac philosophy to the letter. But few seem to realize that you take a multifunctional, unbelievably flexible appendage that has taken several millennia to evolve and reduced it to a stick that shoves around and slams a really neat looking piece of plastic. Good job Jobs.
Shortcuts... I have looked that the Apple suggested specification and the Windows specification, and on face value, I felt they were pretty much the same with Apple having a slight lead. But then you look at market adoption, familiarity, and roll in PC history and it becomes well.... Obvious! It really is a matter of opinion, and I just like this side of the fence, and I am sorry it bothers you SO much. The fact you got a different opinion on this matter, doesn't bother me in the least.
"There are few completely incorrect points here, so I'll hit the big ones...."
Ok, lets get to the meat of the matter.
NO, Apple needs to develop whatever its targeted customer base WANTS. From reading the post I replied to, personal experience, and talking to other full time Mac user friends of mine; I kind of got the feeling that the users wanted x.org (or more accurately gtk/kde) apps to work/appear/conform to Mac type apps. And I stated that the majority of the issues can be solved by Apple developing key translation layers into their side of the equation. Grow a backbone for a change and go ask your vendor of choice to provide you with what you want for the cash you shell out. People do that for th
Microsoft dropped IE for the mac because they couldn't compete with mac alternatives such as Safari, Firefox and Camino. They may drop Office for the mac if Open/NeoOffice does a better job.
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
This is great! Visual basic scripts in Office documents were one of the hardest things to manage from a security perspective because Microsoft's "fixes" for scripting vulnerabilities in Word repeatedly broke the software that we were using to prevent automated script execution in Word. In fact this was the straw that broke the camel's back and the reason we eventually opted for the lesser evil of anti-virus software.
Removing that avenue of attack is a big victory for the continued security of Mac OS X.
Indeed. And not just for Wordfast.
Client says, "Here're 20 Excel files of dialog for Game X. In each file, we want you to translate columns H and K in sheets 1-6, and column B in sheets 7-10, but only the cells that are colored green or pink or that have the name 'Bob' in column C. Please send us an estimate for cost and completion time."
A few lines in VBA can identify precisely the right cells to count across all 20 files and feed them into a counting function (also written in VBA) or dump them into a file for counting with some other application's word/character count feature.
Who uses VBA? Anyone who wants to automate a simple but repetitive task in an MS Office application. Ditto for OOo's scripting languages.
Yes, I should have said, "reversed Judge Jackson's breakup order."
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.