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Microsoft drops VBA in Mac Office 2007
slashdotwriter writes "Macworld features an article stating that the next version of Office for the Mac will not include Visual Basic scripting. From the article: 'Microsoft Office isn't among the apps that will run natively on Intel-based Macs — and it won't be until the latter half of 2007, according to media reports. But when it does ship, Office will apparently be missing a feature so vital to cross-platform compatibility that I believe it will be the beginning of the end for the Mac version of the productivity suite...'"
Someone get a port of OpenOffice.org up and running natively on MacOS X!
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
I think the problem is that some users have code that depends on VBA, and they want it for compatibility reasons. Cedega is (somewhat) popular, not because DirectX is superior to Linux alternatives, but because many computer games depend on it.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
And in other news, Open Office is getting that same feature, for which contribution Novell is being roundly denounced for conspiring with Microsoft to bring about the end of open-source software.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Entourage is a great mail program, unless you want to use it to talk to an Exchange server. As an Exchange client, it sucks.
I have clients who still run Classic exclusively so they can use Outlook 2001. The Exchange support in Entourage has been so shameful for so long (they've taken YEARS and still haven't achieved feature parity with Outlook 2001) that I really have a hard time believing it's not a deliberate move to thwart Mac use in the enterprise.
The same goes for this move. Microsoft makes a TON of money selling Mac Office, and with the Mac market growing and Microsoft standing to see a Mac Office sales increase as a result, it's not like they can't afford the development costs.
These actions only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. There's no other logical explanation.
~Philly
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!
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.
I don't know what's worse: being the one making a 70MB+ powerpoint presentation or the one forced to sit through it!
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 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
seems you answered your own question.
On top of that, the menu bar is in the wrong place. Most Macs these days are laptops, and a top-of-the-screen menu bar is much easier to hit with a trackpad than a window-attached one. It also wastes less screen real-estate, which is quite precious on a laptop.
Drag and drop don't work properly with X11 applications. Even if Apple did integrate XDND with native drag and drop, most X11 application developers don't really make use of it. I can drag a link from Safari into my terminal and have the URL appear. I can drag the icon from the title bar of a document window into an email, and have it become an attachment.
X11 applications don't have access to text services (unless they use GNUstep, and then they should just be linked against Cocoa, instead of run in X11). In a normal rich text box, I can select some text, hit a shortcut key, and have it typeset using LaTeX and inserted as a PDF (great for equations in presentations), or have it evaluated as a mathematical expression, or have the words counted, etc.
All the shortcut keys are wrong in X11 applications. Most X11 developers these days use control or alt, instead of meta, and so motor memory doesn't work for common operations.
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Does anyone still think that the appeals court was right in reversing Judge Jackson's decision? Did anyone expect that Microsoft would behave any differently? I would hope the oversight committee is paying attention, but they're probably they're too busy enjoying a new Ferrari or two. Seriously, it's been said for years that had there been no Apple, Microsoft would have found it necessary to invent one ... but that assumed Apple's market share stayed insignificant. If Apple starts to erode Microsoft's customer base in any substantial way, Microsoft will take steps. This is probably just the first salvo.
But yeah, VBA is something the world should be able to live without.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No, 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.
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!
If someone (Apple or anyone else) could come up with a window manager that followed the shared-menubar style UI of the Mac, it would be a big step in the right direction. X apps simply don't "fit" in a Mac environment. The feel is completely wrong, due to wrong UI element placement and appearance. Mac users (rightly) see X11 apps as a last resort. It's like running GNOME apps in a KDE session, or vice versa, but even worse. Different, not-entirely-compatible mechanisms of doing the same things are at work, and it's not seamless.
If there is a wm that supports Mac-style menubars, I'd love to know about it. Anyone?
Constitutionally Correct
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,
"X applications do not use the..."
Few write for "X" (x.org) they actually write for gtk+, kde-libs, or opengl? and such. Many (expecially kde-libs) of these desktop libraries provide very standardized widgets and shortcuts. Most of these shortcuts are exactly like those on Windows.
I don't really understand what you mean by navigation shortcuts to widgets so if you can explain further...
Anyway, things like native look and feel, and unique position of the menubar (which I still dislike after years of use) fall into the realm of the theme engine and the window manager. Here is a example to show that it _could_ be done...
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=241868
"Drag and drop..."
I think this is also a desktop library thing and for me it works great. I use kmail which is a KDE application; I run Xfce as my desktop and D&D files from my file browser to new emails all the time. These are applications using TWO completely different desktop libraries but they do D&D amazingly well. But I agree that this area needs to be worked on. There are certain times the action taken is predictable but different from the expected.
"X11 applications don't have access to text services..."
I will give you this one. I like this feature in OSX, and haven't found a true equivalent in either Windows or Linux. I think this level of cooperation between applications is something you will easily get in one vendor environments and is extremely slow to develop in scattered systems like open source.
"All the shortcut keys are wrong in X11..."
This is matter of opinion, and personally, I have found the Mac shortcuts to be a PAIN. I like the Windows and KDE shortcuts far better. Especially for Windows, there is much more standardization in third party apps. For the core Mac applications, it is amazing, but it totally falls apart when you leave these applications. I hate developing with Dreamweaver and such for Mac. For me it boils down to shortcut-to-expected action without thought, and it is far better in the Windows realm than Mac. In Mac, I always need to think "ok, what application am I using..." It only takes a microsecond longer, but when I am using 4-5 applications each with 2-5 windows, it ends up being equivalent to using the mouse.
Ok, to summarize, what Apple really needs to do is develop their own theme engine and window manager for kde/gtk. Also, they can provide a translation layer for D&D to and from kde/gtk applications. This will solve 80% of your issues. Apple is closed source, therefore, they are in a much better position to make such software; they owe it to their customer base. There are open source projects that do much of this, but they can never get to the level that Apple can, and you can't expect too much from them as they are developing for a very small market.
Personally, I use Mac, Windows, and Gentoo Linux. I use OSX the least, but have used it for the last 2 years. I find it very... pleasant to use for things like browsing, essays, and image development. I like Linux for programming and cross platform application development. Windows, kind of falls somewhere in between leaning toward Linux. Overall, basic things are great on the Mac, but more complicated things are irritating to do, and the "obviousness" type stuff actually gets in the way of multitasking and feature access.
Standardisation in Windows apps? That's a laugh...
Let's take just one example which bugs me every day I have to use Windows at work: Find again. In many apps I want to go through a page, stopping at each instance of a particular string. In most cases, you start off by pressing Ctrl+F for Find. But once you've found the first match, what do you do to skip to the next? Oh, that's easy, you press Ctrl+G. Except it's not. Sometimes it's Ctrl+Y (Y? Goodness knows.) Sometimes it's that nice memorable F3. And sometimes you can't do it at all; you have to keep the Find dialog visible, which means you have to reach for the mouse every time you switch between going to the next match and editing it. I am *forever* forgetting which strange method of control to use in which app.
And that's just one single almost-universal action, across a small handful of common big-name Windows apps I use every day. Compare that to the Mac, where it's Cmd+G in every app I've come across. And repeat across tons of other little shortcuts and common actions.
'Standardisation'? Hah.
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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?
Choosing function over form means choosing a good user interface. Choosing form over function means choosing a pretty theme for a bad user interface.
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