Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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...
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!
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
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.
seems you answered your own question.
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.
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.
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.
"X applications do not use the..."
Few write for "X" (x.org) they actually write for gtk+, kde-libs, or opengl? and such. Many (expecially kde-libs) of these desktop libraries provide very standardized widgets and shortcuts. Most of these shortcuts are exactly like those on Windows.
I don't really understand what you mean by navigation shortcuts to widgets so if you can explain further...
Anyway, things like native look and feel, and unique position of the menubar (which I still dislike after years of use) fall into the realm of the theme engine and the window manager. Here is a example to show that it _could_ be done...
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=241868
"Drag and drop..."
I think this is also a desktop library thing and for me it works great. I use kmail which is a KDE application; I run Xfce as my desktop and D&D files from my file browser to new emails all the time. These are applications using TWO completely different desktop libraries but they do D&D amazingly well. But I agree that this area needs to be worked on. There are certain times the action taken is predictable but different from the expected.
"X11 applications don't have access to text services..."
I will give you this one. I like this feature in OSX, and haven't found a true equivalent in either Windows or Linux. I think this level of cooperation between applications is something you will easily get in one vendor environments and is extremely slow to develop in scattered systems like open source.
"All the shortcut keys are wrong in X11..."
This is matter of opinion, and personally, I have found the Mac shortcuts to be a PAIN. I like the Windows and KDE shortcuts far better. Especially for Windows, there is much more standardization in third party apps. For the core Mac applications, it is amazing, but it totally falls apart when you leave these applications. I hate developing with Dreamweaver and such for Mac. For me it boils down to shortcut-to-expected action without thought, and it is far better in the Windows realm than Mac. In Mac, I always need to think "ok, what application am I using..." It only takes a microsecond longer, but when I am using 4-5 applications each with 2-5 windows, it ends up being equivalent to using the mouse.
Ok, to summarize, what Apple really needs to do is develop their own theme engine and window manager for kde/gtk. Also, they can provide a translation layer for D&D to and from kde/gtk applications. This will solve 80% of your issues. Apple is closed source, therefore, they are in a much better position to make such software; they owe it to their customer base. There are open source projects that do much of this, but they can never get to the level that Apple can, and you can't expect too much from them as they are developing for a very small market.
Personally, I use Mac, Windows, and Gentoo Linux. I use OSX the least, but have used it for the last 2 years. I find it very... pleasant to use for things like browsing, essays, and image development. I like Linux for programming and cross platform application development. Windows, kind of falls somewhere in between leaning toward Linux. Overall, basic things are great on the Mac, but more complicated things are irritating to do, and the "obviousness" type stuff actually gets in the way of multitasking and feature access.
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.
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."
Choosing function over form means choosing a good user interface. Choosing form over function means choosing a pretty theme for a bad user interface.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Oh yeah, because no one appreciates what the Adium guys have done with libgaim. It doesn't have a legion of users swearing by the application as the best IM client, anywhere, ever.
Mac users appreciate native apps very, very much. Why do you think no one is worried about cannibalized Mac development now that you can run Windows natively on Macs? Because if one software vendor says, "Screw you Mac users, just use our app within Parallels", then the competition has low-hanging fruit which can be picked. If a competitor releases a native Mac application, even if it's not as featured as the Windows one, Mac users will buy it. Know why? Because it runs natively and doesn't force them into haphazard workarounds and hacks to get their work done.
The issue here is that open source programmers may be good programmers, but they generally aren't UI designers. And if they are, they aren't Mac UI designers. So even if they write a native Mac app, it will be implemented with UI conventions from another platform. They'll overuse tabs, make every dialog modal, put the Preferences menu option in the wrong place, etc ... You often see this stuff in Qt apps on OS X. Hell, you see it in Carbon ports of old Mac applications which ran on OS 9. But the worst offenders are Java apps. Jesus god, they look and feel like ass on OS X. I hate that Azureus is the most featured BT client out there because it sucks when it's not running on Linux or Windows, where looking robotic and using tabs for everything is apparently acceptable.
Personally, I use Mac, Windows, and Gentoo Linux. I use OSX the least, but have used it for the last 2 years. I find it very... pleasant to use for things like browsing, essays, and image development. I like Linux for programming and cross platform application development.
What cross-platform development? I am a full-time J2SE/J2EE developer and I develop %100 of the time in OS X. OS X is by far the best Java development platform I have ever used, especially considering that Java is a first-tier language included with the OS, and easily exceeding Windows and Linux (especially considering the continual reconfiguration and dependency hell that is Linux). For OS X specific applications, Objective C in XCode is actually quite easy and intuitive to use, with XCode being an excellent IDE. For Windows-specific development, I run a copy of Windows in Parallels. If I was not able to use OS X, I would use Linux and configure it heavily to work like OS X, and would do everything I could to not use Windows for development. But, from what you say, it is obvious you do no actual development on any platform, especially not OS X.
Windows, kind of falls somewhere in between leaning toward Linux. Overall, basic things are great on the Mac, but more complicated things are irritating to do, and the "obviousness" type stuff actually gets in the way of multitasking and feature access.
Obviousness? Is that even a word? Putting that aside, what "obviousness" are you talking about? I cannot think of a single obvious task in OS X that somehow gets in the way of multitasking and feature access. Most newbies tend to complain about shortcut keys, but do not make the effort to look them up (they are even online) or turn them on globally in the preferences for all applications and dialogs. And since you are complaining about shortcut keys in applications, it not only shows that you are obviously a newbie, but that you are complaining about a problem which is not specific to OS X. All of the OS X shortcut keys are standardized and logical. If there is a non-standard shortcut key in a specific application, then it is a vendor issue and not an OS X issue. If you are complaining about something other than shortcut keys, then you will be just as full of shit about that as you are about everything else.
Ok, to summarize, what Apple really needs to do is develop their own theme engine and window manager for kde/gtk. Also, they can provide a translation layer for D&D to and from kde/gtk applications. This will solve 80% of your issues. Apple is closed source, therefore, they are in a much better position to make such software; they owe it to their customer base. There are open source projects that do much of this, but they can never get to the level that Apple can, and you can't expect too much from them as they are developing for a very small market.
There are few completely incorrect points here, so I'll hit the big ones. First, Apple needs to develop software and SDK's for the development of OS X specific applications and truly cross-platform applications like Java. Apple does not need to make Linux programs compatible whatsoever. If a Linux program wants to run on OS X, then the Linux program should change to accommodate, Apple makes the API available for programmers to use in a multitude of languages. Apple does not somehow owe Linux compatibility to anyone. And marketshare doesn't mean shit to well qualified and driven developers. How many main developers does it take to make OpenOffice into NeoOffice? Two.
What your post really says is that you use Linux and Windows on a PC. You have seen screenshots of OS X, possibly even used it a minute or two in an Apple store, and get the rest of your OS X information from linux.slashdot.org. You should use OS X full-time before writing reviews of it for other people on Slashdot who have never used OS X before either.