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.
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
This is definitely good for Vista sales in the long term because of the new Vista EULA terms regarding running Vista in a virtual machine.
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.
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)
Actually the situation regarding vista and vm's is rather different than you put it. It is only one of the cheapest versions which has an EULA clause (i.e. it'll work but be "illegal") preventing you from running it as a VM.
I'm going over here and I don't know why!
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 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
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 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.
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.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
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
No, you couldn't.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Umm... Crossover Mac states that Office versions 2000 and XP (2002) are "supported" but not recommended, while Office 2003 is fully supported.
It even shows a warning in the installer dialog when you choose to install the older versions of Office. It says something about how they're supported, but that there are usually glitches with those versions. I've not seen a glitch yet, though, and I use Office 2000. Rarely.
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."
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Finally, IIRC, you can't easily open a control panel and change "Control-W" from "Close Window" to "backwards-kill-word" like you can in KDE and GNOME. Apple has a lot of fanbois ... but when it comes right down to having a usable computing environment...
Go to "System Prferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts", and you can add or redefine any application's keyboard shortcuts. I mean, just in case you're on a Mac sometime and want a "usable computing environment".
And it would appear that Apple isn't the only system with fanbois...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
The themeing and look isn't determined by the application, but the windowmanager/desktop environment. Meaning that if you write an app for KDE, KDE will determine how the app looks.
Same thing if you write for OSX' carbon or cocoa, or whatever the hell it's called.
-- Linux user #369862