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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...'"
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.
Everyone, pool your mod points and give 'em to this guy. I always found it ridiculous that OpenOffice has to run on an X session, it always seemed like a horrible kludge to me, especially getting printing to work. If we can get OpenOffice running natively and smoothly, and soon, we can give Office Mac users a real alternative that's not only free (which is something that Mac users aren't used to), but also high quality and works well enough to easily replace it.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
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."
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...
Use openoffice and export to PDF, stick it on a usb drive. That way if the pres is large it will still render, and more importantly, if your laptop doesn't work with the setup another may and your pdf will render there...
I r smrt.
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
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!
Indeed. Saw it after my post (poster's regret, and all) and thought it was a grand old idea. Now if the OOo team can just officially support that and make that the new version of OOo for Mac, instead of the ugly hack they have going right now, I'll have plenty of hope for the future.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
So assuming MS indeed drops VB, what are they going to use for their macros now ?
.NET", there wouldn't be that problem.
I'd wager C++ or C#. Or, more likely, just any "dot-net" language. It's currently a pain to write C# code to automate Office, but if Office became "native
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
Everyone, pool your mod points and give 'em to this guy.
It just takes 3 people to mod someone up to 5... If you think about it, that's why there are so many lame 5 point posts.
Excel users will notice, oh Lord will they notice
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.
Yep, Windows is the new Classic.
After a week, you'll figure out a way not to need it.
-- My Weblog.
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.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
No, it isn't. Pages might be designed more towards page layout than pure word processing, but it is easy to use and having nice looking documents doesn't bother anyone. No, it doesn't compete with Quark, but neither does Word.
What iWork needs is a spreadsheet application, and possibly a database program.
The MacWorld Expo is coming soon.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
And this is why I believe one of the biggest mistakes the U.S. Justice Department made when handling Microsoft's antitrust case was deciding to leave the company intact, rather than splitting the company into 3 (OS, Office, Entertainment). Now, instead of seeing independent and smart business decisions being made in their productivity and entertainment suites to help them grow, they will continue to be boil down to one final parameter: Does it help the Windows unit hold onto its grasp on the PC market? And worst of all, the consumers suffer by not being able to play their Windows Media DRM'd music in other operating systems to continuing to reap innovations in the Office suite.
I believe Palm made a smart move splitting the hardware and software components; now, instead of allowing the Palm devices to fall behind due to unparalleled support of the operating system, they can adapt to market demands. Apple also made one of the smartest move in the company's history by opening up the iPod and iTunes to both Windows and Mac computers. Come on Microsoft, grow up.
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.
When do home users ever read or pay attention to EULAs? And businesses won't run the home edition, so they'll be able to run it in a VM just fine...
-Z
and the old stuff runs fine under Rosetta.
Powerpoint barely runs at all under Rosetta.
Excel takes six or seven bounces to launch. Not acceptable on up-to-the-minute hardware.
Word eats 7%-10% cpu sitting idle. Doesn't help the battery life when you're writing on the road.
NeoOffice, while a great tool to have around, is so poorly optimized that it's barely faster native than MS Office is under Rosetta (sometimes slower).
Back to the topic... this move by MS is part of a continued effort to prevent Macs from making any inroads into the corporate space, which is MS's most lucrative market. After the next release of Mac Office, the consumers/educational types/etc. will be thrilled -- it will probably look gorgeous, run fast, etc. But business users, most of whom have brain-dead VBA cruft to deal with, will have no choice but to run Windows Office somehow... which involves a license of Windows, at least until CodeWeavers is able to make Office versions newer than 2000 run under Crossover Mac.
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
When the file hits 70megs it starts to hit a crawl.
.odc, immediately Copy the contents, and paste it into a new document - which fixes the crashing problem for another 10-15 saves.
This is a big problem for the few long document writers who use Macs. Long Word documents on the Mac take forever to open - tables render slowly, repagination consumes 180% of my CPU, and making changes at the end of a complex 400-page document is an exercise in frustration on a 4.5GB RAM/Dual 2.5GHz G5 - twenty seconds from "Save" to response.
Once, Framemaker on Macs and Solaris machines were what Technical Writers used - period. Over the years, the lowest-common-denominator mentality of corporate purchasing has taken over - and Adobe has handed Microsoft a huge gift by killing the Mac version of FrameMaker, forcing Mac writers to use Word.
The end result has been that most new companies - those without established Tech Pubs departments - use Word for everything. It's been my experience that the younger the Tech Pubs manager is, the less inclined they are to use FrameMaker - because it's "teh hard". Unfortunately for tech writers and their audiences, Frame still is the most complete and usable tool for long documents - but it's on the way out.
Now, documents from HR manuals to API references to microprocessor manuals are written in Word, which has barfed up anything over about forty ages for over a decade now. Seriously - Microsoft has never fixed the corrupted save and document recovery bugs that 95% of users never experience - because you'll only see the problem when you create long, complex documents.
When working on a recent assignment for a Group that shall remain nameless, I spent most of my time trying to work around Word's limitations. I asked the SME about the source material - did he have problems like mine when using Word on his company-issued top-flight PC? "Yes." Would they consider using Framemaker for their next document? "I don't have time to learn a new program" said the scientist.
Keep in mind, I spent ten of sixty billable hours just trying to get Word to process words. Ostensibly, this is what it's designed to do, but this decade-plus-old program still cannot handle long documents with lots of graphics. Microsoft was busy doing other things, like churning out ten versions of DirectX and the Zune - other products that extend and extinguish.
I'm not asking for a lot. We're talking about a 400-page document with lots of tables, few graphics, and fewer than twenty styles. This would be among the medium-sized documents that FrameMaker could open in 1-2 seconds. In Word, on a Dual G5, it takes over four minutes to completely open the document, because Word insists on repaginating every time you look askance. then, after about ten-fifteen Saves, Word barfs. Sometimes, the only way you can get the document back is to open the
This isn't a document-specific or release-specific problem. I've wasted time on this with several recent versions of Word - on the Mac and PC - and with several similar documents. The problem will likely never be fixed. And because of Adobe's shortsightedness and Microsoft's LCD mentality, the only real alternative is LaTex - a very complex solution to what should be an easy problem. Frame was the ideal, but Adobe dutifully did the most stupid thing possible and killed it on the Mac. I wouldn't mind using Frame on the PC, but as I said above, most of the assignments I take on as a contract technical writer come to me in Word.
Tying this into the VBA-less Mac version of Office, it's clear that Microsoft IS trying to force the professionals who insist on using Macs off the platform. Just as they've convinced the memo-writers in corporate IT that Word on any platform is perfectly suitable for the Tech Pubs department, they slowly reduce the options available to users, costing companies time and money that goes unnoticed and untabulated in the TCO equation.
Office for Mac development costs them next to nothing,
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.
Yes, keynote can import and export powerpoint documents. I used it this past week for school and had powerpoint backup files all over the place just incase something happened. After using Keynote, it is impossible to go back to Powerpoint - it just doesn't work the way a presentation program should.
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
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.
"It's very much a Mac program. Native fonts, copy-and-paste, printing, Aqua interface..."
You mean other than, apparently, not using the men bar?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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!
The next version of Pages, according to sources, will introduce two specialized modes for layout and word-processing. Apple apparently plans to adopt Pages for all its internal documentation needs. Apple doesn't need to approach the level of functionality in Office, as the majority of people only use a tenth of what Office offers anyway. If they can make a decent Word alternative for most people, that's good enough.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Why use a button? Excel has these amazing things called "formulas". I've made some amazingly disgusting ones in my time. Like this one:
) ,"00")&TEXT(DAY($A$5),"00")&$B10&"2",SomeOtherShee tName,2,0)0),VLOOKUP(YEAR($A$5)&TEXT(MONTH($A$5)," 00")&TEXT(DAY($A$5),"00")&$B10&"2",SomeOtherSheetN ame,2,0),"")
) + (((Date)a5.getCellData()).getDay()).format("00") + b10.getCellData() + "2";
=IF(AND($A$5"",VLOOKUP(YEAR($A$5)&TEXT(MONTH($A$5
In pseudo-Java style, that looks something like this:
Cell a5 = new Cell("A", "5");
Cell b10 = new Cell("B", "10");
CellData lookup;
String lookupTag;
if(a5.contents != null)
{
lookupTag = ((Date)a5.getCellData()).getYear() + (((Date)a5.getCellData()).getMonth()).format("00"
lookup = CellData.vlookup(lookupTag, "SomeOtherSheetName", 2, 0);
if(lookup != null)
{
return lookup;
}
}
return null;
This looks up (for example) 2006121042 (the B10 values are 1,2,3,4,BH,SQ), in a "database" in a different sheet (named "SomeOtherSheetName" in this case). It checks if the value of the lookup is not 0 (null number), as well as if A5 is "" (null string). If it passes this check, the value of this cell is the value of the lookup. If it fails this check, the value is "" (null string).
Nasty as it is, the Excel function is certainly more compact than any language is going to be. It also has this habit of updating automatically in realtime, which is "the right way". Correct data should never rely on user input.
And just to allay the fears of those who retched at this, this is a temporary implementation (to stop the bleeding), and a replacement using MAPP (Mac, Apache, Postgres, PHP) is on track to replace this nastiness within two months.
I'll probably get flamebait or troll for this but, what the hell? So far I've got enough karma, so I must not be pissing off the saner of the modders (yet)...
.doc docs, I just shoot them to my mydata folder and edit them in Lotus Word Pro, then shoot them back as word 97 or word 2000 format. I am not worried how it looks on the other end because so far no one has complained.
How QUICK is NeoOffice? Is it faster than OOo is on Linux? ON my box, OOo takes up to 1.5 minutes to get its ass away, just to get to a blank screen. And, no, I don't run that little cheat/kudge quick-start thing. And this is with a MINIMUM of anything else open. Even Win4Lin 4.x is not invoked at this point. But, since Lotus SmartSuite from 1986-2002 can start Word Pro in under 8 seconds in Win4Lin in windoze 98 in 256 MB of shared ram, on an 6 and on a 128 MB card, in 700, 800 and 900 MHz systems, then why the hell is OOo still taking forEVER? OOo has been around for years, and has had at least 1 or 2 major code shifts, and still relies on a few gimmicks to appear to run faster.
When I have to download
Even when I run a RealVNC session from my semi-functional 800 MHz laptop (diskless/dead hardware controller, so no hdd functionality) box when I run Win4Lin/Win98 (it only lets me run one session at a time from one computer) on my 900 MHz fic box, the remote session across TWO thin wires between NICs is smooth, fast, and stable.
So, how are Mac users doing so far with Neo Office? I don't own a Mac but I guess I will check by the Mac store and see if they are selling or loading or displaying it.
Really, OOo, you ought to give up, throw in the towel, and urge IBM/Lotus and Han Office to join forces with you to clean up your code, pursue more markets, and become more nimble, more stable, and tighten up and crispen the interface.
Fix the database to look more professional. Ditch that spreadsheet metaphor and make Base a more independent/separate-feeling app. It should have a worksheet not the spreadsheet underneath. Widgets and forms should behave like they are a separate app, not be all confusing and mimic other apps. And, take a few pages from Lotus Approach to learn how a non-engineer-necessary relational database front-end works for end users. I've built in Approach a screenplay dialog tracking application that has fewer than 120 formulas, a few dozen mostly-unused macros, and a good number of forms to manage dialog, manuscripts, and scrap dialog. I'll bet anyone trying to do this in Base will feel DEbased and go insane. (While the actual work was spread out over 2-3 years, if compressed it might be 6 months worth of work, and that is just as myself as an individual...) If only I knew how to program, I could just ditch Approach and use RealBasic or Trolltech's QT or maybe even Glade (if I can ditch that Gnome file manager paradigm...).
Fix the word processor to more sensibly/intelligently display multi-part documents. Ditch that lame "rule" line or shoe-horn area where externally linked docs go. Put a TAB at top or bottom or side (even better, let the USER decide how their tab/scrapbook view will look...) of the workspace so that the user can ad hoc name them as documents are added to the project. The tabs should let the user format globally or individually each section's/division's page layout, footers, headers, and more. Like Lotus Word Pro does. You guys REALLY need to take a few pages out of Lotus Word Pro. IBM is Open Source friendly these days, haven't you heard? If you're going to reinvent the wheel, then be grander, bolder, and do stunning improvements or introduce NEW features, not just improve on the seen-that-done-that. If it's underwhelming or overwhelming, nobody's going to want it anyway, so why not stop the ms-mimic routine and improve FOSS with some non-ms-copy-cat features.
But, when OOo starts up on 5 to 8 seconds without gimmicky pre-loading, and starts as fast in Linux as OOo seems to in windoze, then I can tell my browser "Open in OpenOffice.org" instead of "Save as..." to be opened in Lotus Word Pro.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Call that a formula? It may be long, but it's still fairly simple. When you want to check what value someone was given in another experiment, and (for convenience) give the explanation, it gets a bit more complicated (but still simple enough to do as a formula)
=VLOOKUP(VLOOKUP(A3,OtherSheetName!A:D,4,FALSE),O
(put in some IF( ) parts to hide the #N/A entries, and it gets long, but still not complicated)
On the other hand, if you want to pull dates from a whole string of text entered (and the date may be input as dd/mm/yy or dd mmm yyyy or any combination of the two), then VBA is pretty much the only way to go without making the spreadsheet even larger (and slower) than it already is.
In short, VBA has its place, but so do formulas.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
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
The problem is when 'most people' are using a different tenth of Office's functionality :P
Your point about the customizability of OS X is good, but I disagree somewhat with your comment on Apple not having a unified GUI. Certainly in the past several years Apple's various apps have gone through several different looks, but the behavior of the GUI has been consistent. No matter what the color, all the scrollbars act the same (except for some third-party java apps). The consistent layout of menus and dialogs is more important than the color scheme.
Apple still has no good excuse for their indecision about color schemes. One would think that all of their artists could come up with something and stick to it.