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...'"
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.
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."
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
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!
Yep, and with the support of the OOo folks, I hope that Windows users soon will be in a place where they don't notice the difference either... Seriously, does MS have any feet left to shoot?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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.
Today's horribly overused Slashdot trope: "Anyone".
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)
I don't know what's worse: being the one making a 70MB+ powerpoint presentation or the one forced to sit through it!
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.
I think you have underestimated how much of a productivity boon Automator can be. It is not really tied in with any office-type apps, but it is an alternative to xcode for end users.
fork over the $80 and use keynote. it is vastly superior to powerpoint, both in terms of ease of creation and in final output quality.
Excel users will notice, oh Lord will they notice
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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,
Steve doesn't want people to do that. You will find that if you're PowerPoint presentation gets bigger than 100 megabytes, your battery will explode.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
Written like a true corporate I.T. coward with little understanding of the big picture and less understanding of what his customers (the users) actually need to accomplish their jobs
See my post above for why this is a big deal. Dropping support for this feature is just one more step on a long march to kill off anything that's not a secretary's tool for Windows in the corporate space.
fork over the $80 and use keynote. it is vastly superior to powerpoint, both in terms of ease of creation and in final output quality.
Can it import PowerPoint documents? There is nothing worse than migrating to a "vastly superior" product only not to support the most used format in the office place.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I have yet to find a management-type who wouldn't leap at the offer of replacing a stodgy, circa-1995 automated Word document with some sort of web-based application instead.
That's a relief because VB sucks. The article's budget planning by spreadsheet sounded like an absolute nightmare to me. VBA, like VB itself, had more versions than Windows itself and each new version broke the old scripts. The scripts in the last fortune 100 company I worked for would be fixed by a student intern. The idea behind using PCs in the first place was to give workers power and flexibility in their jobs so they could get what they wanted without an IT guy. It did not work out that way because the workers were too busy getting their jobs done to keep up with ever changing shit like VBA. Deployment of decent collaboration tools is the way forward and that's all happening outside the M$ 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.
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.
Well it is running under software emulation (Rosetta), it's bound to be slow! At least Office 2007 *should* be Universal Binary when it arrives.
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.
One thing I should mention is that Microsoft actually uses OLE for the document format and everything else is simply an embedded data type. OLE is part of the operating system in MS-Windows, and probably has some important optimisations because of this. On the Mac, and anywhere else that wants to support the office document format, you must first implement something to support OLE.
I should note that I am not saying the OLE is a bad technology, but it is hindered by the lack of cross-platform support for the technology and by the fact you can't tell programs to use a universal data format for a certain data type, it simply does or doesn't, depending on the application you are using (see here for one story). The other issue is the help application only includes a reference to the data and not the data itself, which is usally the cause of Word not able to display certain images, such as those from Visio!!
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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
COM is an 800lb gorilla approach to making software that is language, but not platform, agnostic. COM is like the Truman Show for computers; it seems like the way to go, until you realize that there is a heck of a lot more world outside Redmond's bubble.
Are they dropping all support from Office, just the IDE, what? Lots of ways for to skin the cat...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Amen to that. 90% of what I do in Excel is type in a value and hit a button to calculate/update values. Without something like VBA, I would probably be better off using a notepad and a calculator.
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.
the Systems Engineering group in our R&D shop, which is all Mac, uses Word for their technical requirements. it's been the source of countless hours of frustration and problems.
my own approach is to just give up on it: at various times, i've had over half the SE group ready to go back to troff (they were all old Bell Labs types), or possibly a TeX variant. in addition to behaving orders of magnitude more predictably, it's great for collaborative documents, since you can stick it under normal source control very easily. unfortunately, there was one member of the group who never knew either, and another who was in love with GUI editors, so i never quite pulled off the coup. even the group's director was on board for a while. i think if i had spent a weekend or two putting toghether some nice macro sets for them they'd have gone for it. oh, well; next time.
in the end, we got by with lots of folk knowledge of the form "oh, don't do that!" and the good luck to be working on a project where we could logically decompose the requirements into several 75-200 page documents instead of one 400-600 one.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
I don't think Microsoft is full of idiots like you seem to imply in this last post.
Sometimes, their goals diverge a bit from the goals of some of their users, but in the end I'm sure they made their calculations and decided this is the better way for them.
And I think it is, from a Microsoft point of view. You cannot really blame them for doing what they think it's best for them and not what is best for you and people in your same position (a very small percentage of their userbase).
Maybe Microsoft will pull out a PC-only version of a program that addresses the needs you specified: remembers that Microsoft is pulling out a big offensive against Adobe aswell, so we might soon see a rival of Framemaker pop out at a quarter the price, half the functions and double the bugs.
Anyway the true point in all this is that Microsoft wants to kill Mac OS X, being by far its most threatening competitor. And it has all the cards to win this game.
nbody2002:If you can read this you may be addicted to the internet
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
Check out Scribus. I'm unsure if there's an official OSX port, but given that it's a Qt application...
Or, check out one of the LaTeX distributions and combine it with a superior editor like TextMate. I certainly wouldn't feel too bad about not having PageMaker.
The revolution will be mocked
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.
Keynote opens PowerPoint documents just fine. It will even open files that PowerPoint can't. Corrupt files are fairly common, and Keynote (also NeoOffice) can open and re-save them (the files usually get much smaller) in a usable fashion. The worst I saw (besides a business plan presentation that just wouldn't open) was when an intern spent all day putting about 60 hi-res scans into a .ppt file. The next morning the file wouldn't open. I had to open the file in Keynote on our studliest workstation (dual 2.7 GHz G5 with lots of RAM) and it still took all night just to open the roughly 2GB file.
If you run a Mac Office you need a copy of Open/NeoOffice around to salvage documents. And you really should have Keynote if you do important presentations, it's just that much better than PowerPoint.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
My Language Study Aide is another example of automation that I couldn't achieve without VBA in excel. It builds a list of 30 words based on how well I've translated them in the past (the worst have a higher priority) and then quizzes me with them randomly, with multiple choice or free input.
And as long as we're comparing formulas: This one gives the user an idea of how many words they need to translate based on a once per week schedule.
The organization that I am presently a part of is heavily invested in Word, Groupwise, and Novell. All three of which are bloated and tend to cause more support problems than they actually solve. The group that I work with doesn't answer to the rest of the IT organization and we tend to do our own thing. Since we, there are two of us in a group of ten in an organization of over eleven thousand, are responsible for the organizations web presence we tend to look for free and open software. In some instances we must use non-free or non-open software. Once such instance is interactive forms. We have chosen to use Adobe PDF Forms because many of our users are of the lowest common denominator and being able to just send them the form just works.
The only thing that I see Microsoft doing is presenting the perfect opportunity for products such as Open Office to step in and take over. As I said to a co-worker, Office 2007 will require you to learn a new user interface so why not switch to Open Office?
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?!?!
I wonder ... does anyone know what Microsoft uses to create what documentation they create? It would be ironic if they _didn't_ use Word.
Framemaker on Macs and Solaris machines were what Technical Writers used - period.
What year are you talking? TeX/LaTex came out around the same time as postscript and the whole move from VMS/Unix mini computer typesetting to PC typesetting (around the mid 1980s). The old stuff was TeX like (troff, XIX...). Framemaker (along with stuff like Ventura) was huge for long docs up until the early 1990s but the technical community has always been divided.
Anyway as far as LaTex goes there are lots of fairly easy Latex based solutions (do a search under TeX guis). As far as Word you have to get people to use chapters. t
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?
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"
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!
You can shoot a foot more than once.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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
"... professionals who insist on using Macs off the platform." This is what I wanted to get at with my post: As a translator, I use Windows at a large firm in conjunction with the translation memory tool TRADOS. TRADOS only runs on Windows. At home I use a Mac. The only TRADOS-compatible translation memory software is Wordfast http://www.wordfast.net/), which runs on Windows, Linux and Mac as a VBA application. As a Mac user, I make the best of the Windows/Word dominance through the VBA integration of Wordfast. This compatibility, this way of hooking onto the dominant platform is now closed with the abandonment of VBA for Mac. This in effect forces me back into the Windows/Word fold via a licence for Windows and a licence for Word for Windows in conjunction with Parallels Workstation. Microsoft now has got people like me back on Windows - on my Mac! People who praise virtualization solutions such as Parallels have to realize that - in instances such as these at least - this gets us back to where Microsoft wants us.
The problem is when 'most people' are using a different tenth of Office's functionality :P
And if I may second you again (http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=210972& cid=17188244/), it's all well and good to want to "Think Different", but at some point you're going to have to link back into the dominant platform, especially as a professional. VBA allowed you to do that, relatively cheaply, on a Mac in exchange of purchasing just one licence from Microsoft (for MS-Office). Now you're going to have to purchase two (Windows, Office for Windows) or three (if you still want the VBA-less Office for Mac) plus a virtualization solution such as Parallels. For that price, it may be cheaper just to get a Windows machine sold with a special deal on MS-Office. The good thing about VBA for Mac was that you could integrate with the IT-people at your firm every knowing that you were on an alternative platform - for which they are deaf anyway.
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?
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.
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. ;-)
But Slashdotters are so much smarter than everyone else!
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.
It isn't quite where they want us, we've reduced their footprint to only what is absolutely required. This also creates more pressure to find other solutions to this issue. This is what free markets are suposed to do. That's why MS doesn't really want them.
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.
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.