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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...'"
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
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.
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,