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VBA Going Away, Macs Now, PCs Soon
Nom du Keyboard writes "As Microsoft drops support for older Office file formats, it looks like Visual Basic for Applications is also going soon. Mac Office 2008 has dropped VBA in favor of enhanced support for AppleScript, and Office 2009 is scheduled to lose it in favor of Mac incompatible Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) or Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). This sounds like the Mother of All Backwards and Cross-Platform Incompatibilities — especially since there appears to be no transition period where both the old and new scripting languages will be simultaneously supported. And as past experience with Visual Studio .NET has shown, upgrade tools are far less than perfect."
I hated the years when Visual Basic was thought to be a technical marvel. What were they thinking? And why do companies like to jump on every new thing without evaluating the good from the bad? Maybe some companies just think that everything that MS sends out is an upgrade.
God spoke to me.
dim vbaRelevancy
set vbaRelevancy=new activeXObject("vbaWantsToLive")
if vbaRelevancy.microsoftBacking(2009)=false then Office2009="VSTO"
set vbaRelevancy=nothing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This could be good news! We currently have to support MS Office versions of our customizations for Windows, and OOo versions for Linux / Unix. Since Microsoft is forcing us to go back and rewrite the MS Office versions if we upgrade our Windows apps - why not just upgrade to OOo on all platforms, avoid the rewrite cost, and maintain just one set of customizations going forward!
Yes, yes, I see a great "employee suggestion" fattening my wallet this year...
Well, this news are for Open Office (and other open source office suites) what Vista was for Linux! If Microsoft continues shooting itself on its foot, open source software will have no trouble at all to gain its deserved market share!
I don't mind seeing software companies trash their customers' investments this way. It just means that more people will learn (albeit the hard way) just how tied they are to the whims of their vendors, and seek a way to end the pain. The outcomes of that are generally a step forward for the industry.
For example, this could cause some people to start demanding more of their software vendors (e.g. open formats, better support contracts, whatever). Or it could cause them to look at free/open formats and software as a way to avoid this problem in the future.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
I guess moving to OO or StarOffice would not be such a bad move after all then. La least the macro language is consistent across apllications as well as platforms.
..
I guess the only question remaining is why you would run Windows after that, but you should ave been asking that question quite a while back
Insert
Screwed over and locked in, with no cross-platform support?
Flippancy aside, Microsoft trots out what they decree is the Next Big Thing about every 4-5 years. In the process, they act like what they used to call the New Hotness is a smelly pile they want to get away from, and drop support for it. Of course, it was a smelly pile in the first place, but it was their smelly pile and they wanted you to buy it and spent a lot of money convincing you it was good.
In the mean time, companies have spent a lot of money supporting and implementing the technologies, buying training, books, etc. Then you re-start the cycle all over again. This is just the next in a long-line of technologies that Microsoft has swept under the rug and moved on. Then a whole new gravy train starts.
Of course, they get the added benefit that you will have even less support and functionality on Mac OS. And, if that is the case, then why would someone by a Mac when they need Office?
I suspect this is 1/3 "technical", 1/3 "strategic", and 1/3 "because we can, bitches".
In the end, who is to stop them? The customers never leave en masse like people have been predicting for as long as I can remember. People adopt the technologies. And, everyone just sucks it up and gets on with their day.
Trotting new, unfinished technologies and dropping older, unfinished technologies and charging for it is Microsoft's bread and butter. It's one big hamster wheel.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I go to a community college -- and I wanted to take a C programming class for my Summer semester.
:x
I was considering myself royally screwed that I'd have to undertake a Visual Basic class (which acts as a prerequisite for the C class), but really I'm more screwed than I previously though. Not only will I be taking a course of an ineffective, language I'll be taking a course of an ineffective, soon-to-be-useless language.
Hrm, suggestions on what I should do?
Sad, that was always my favorite "thing that schools never secure". You can just about always get into VBA macros on Word, and use that to run a command line or regedit or etc.
Arguments about open source alternatives aside, doesn't EndNote use VBA for all of it's scripting? I'm sure it's fine for the Windows side for which they can add in VSTA/VSTO support, but won't this kill EndNote for the Mac? I seem to recall that EndNote uses VBA for all of its formatting and layout within Word.
I'm a grad student in biology and we are almost entirely a Mac group (it's seems to be rare to see a completely PC bio group these days I think). It would be quite a shame if this decision had rather strong ripples throughout a number of other companies whose business models are predicated on using VBA in Office.
Nope, you misunderstand the strategy employed by Microsoft.
First, they say they will make a sudden switch, everyone will be stumped, irked, and in various states of disbelief at their ballsy move.
Then they will "concede" and support both scripting languages for one more version, and people will think they've won, and a gradual transition takes place. Managers are happy because they "made" Microsoft change their position on abandoning VB right away, and Microsoft will be happy because they were planning it all along. The only unhappy few are the IT people that get to recode from one language into another.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
I work at a company that does transcription and the only reason we have stuck with Word was that we have been able to continue utilizing the considerable VBA macro code base we have maintained since Word 97. With the various Word updates, there have been some hiccups, but for the most part, we've been able to keep the same code for Word 97 even through the abomination that is Word 2007. Before you guys start pulling out the flamethrower, in 97 you had Word and WordPerfect, and WordPerfect was busy figuring out how to kill whatever marketshare they still had.
If I have to rewrite everything to work with the next rev of Word, and we have to tell all our transcriptionists they have have to buy the latest (and probably not greatest version) of Word, what incentive would I have not to seriously consider a migration to Open Office?
This idea was probably thought up by the same genius that decided to shut off backward-file compatibility and save as formatted text filters.
Because, as we know, all thing FOSS interoperate perfectly, and the people developing them always do a fantasticly stable and secure and well designed job.
I'm not surprised that Microsoft is dropping VBA support for the Mac. After all, the easiest way to kill the Mac as a viable business platform is to make it so that business applications written in VBA on top of Excel or Word no longer work on the Mac. Microsoft is starting to get a little worried about losing desktop marketshare to Apple, and a crippled or incompatible MS Office for Mac would fix that perfectly.
Forcing people to rewrite VBA applications on Windows, on the other hand, is a completely different kettle of fish. One of the primary reasons that OpenOffice.org has problems in the corporate market is that companies have invested heavily in applications written in VBA on top of Word and Excel. If Microsoft forces people to rewrite these applications then the door is suddenly wide open for MS Office replacements.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
They've shifted scripting paradigms before. Word used to have its own dialect of Basic, and Excel originally did all its scripting with those @ functions.
.NET, they neglected to replicate this functionality. They did provide a .NET version of VB, but it's just another OO language. So VB.NET programmers have to master the .NET object framework. Might as well learn C# and be done with it.
What's really painful is not the death of VBA as such. What's painful is Microsoft's decision to do away with the whole Visual Basic paradigm without providing anything to replace it.
What do I mean by by "Visual Basic paradigm"? I don't mean the (very sucky) language. I mean the integration of the language to all those COM interfaces that permeate Microsoftland, including Office. These COM interfaces are all part of object frameworks, but because they're interfaces rather than objects, you don't have to master the object framework in order to use them
When MS got bored with COM and decided to move on to
I'm a user of OneNote, which was the first MS Office application to be released without a builtin Visual Basic engine. You can automate OneNote, but the learning curve's much steeper than it would be with VBA. I've never found time to assault it.
Even though I've always despised the pre-.NET dialect of Visual Basic, I find I'm missing it terribly.
I'm not all corporations, but I've been around a few decades. Here's my 2 cents worth.
All of the OOo code is licensed under the LGPL, and can be freely downloaded, built and customized. So yes, it's possible. The sky's the limit; it's just software. :-) Several factors make it less likely that a corporation would take this approach, however.
One is that such a customization would very likely be deemed a "derivative work" by Legal, in which case if it were distributed (e.g., to suppliers for a given project, or even arguably to contractors working for the corporation), then the source must be made available as well. Non-software corporations tend to be allergic to releasing their source code, in my experience, because their lawyers tend to be very conservative. Some manager somewhere will likely have to bet his career by accepting legal liability for the corporation. Will the risk to his career if Something Bad Happens justify the benefit he perceives?
The issue of support will also likely be raised. What if the customized version breaks - who will "support" it? Yes, yes, we all know the internal team of developers will - assuming they weren't laid off in the last "shareholder value" improvement exercise (a constant risk in corporate America). But IT directors tend to go the other direction, from what I've seen - they want to outsource support (and legal indemnification) for open source software, so it can be treated as if it were proprietary. Proprietary means comfort; a target at which the finger can point if Something Bad Happens. This tendency is likely the foundation of IBM's business case for Symphony, by the way.
Finally, if a support team were to be established in a corporation to produce a custom version of OOo, they would need to have some type of development environment. As much fun as bashing Microsoft may be, Visual Studio and .NET are not technically inferior products. So a corporation is unlikely to consider that an inferior option to, say, Eclipse technology. Sure, it costs a lot more - but it's a small number of licenses. They probably wouldn't hesitate.
But in the end, I suspect a lot of corporations just want to write scripts and such without mucking around in the source code proper. The issues most likely to resonate are: (1) How do you efficiently distribute the customizations? (2) How hard are they to develop and maintain? and (3) Can we use them on all of our platforms as is, or do we have to port or (ack!) redevelop for each platform? The third is where Microsoft's "Windows Everywhere" bias may hurt them with this decision to abandon VBA. (Gee, now I'm sure glad we chose to use Python as the scripting language in our internal applications! :-)
In the end, who is to stop them? The customers never leave en masse like people have been predicting for as long as I can remember. People adopt the technologies. And, everyone just sucks it up and gets on with their day.
Customers have no real loyalty. They buy Office because they've got a pile of office documents. Things like VBA and the UI for Office have changed in the past but for the most part they've been incremental changes that can be dealt with easily compared to changing products.
My first version of Word was Word 2. It's been a long time but I think there was a change when they moved to Word 6.0 and dropped the DOS version. Since then (the early 90s) changes to the Interface in Word have been comparatively small. You could open the same documents you wrote in Word 6 in Word 2003. Complex macros may have incompatibilities due to added security features etc. but many simple ones were fine. Importantly you could take a Word 6 user and stick them in front of Word 2003 and with a few hours of use they'd be just fine.
Now that they've changed the UI completely and are dropping the Macro and old file support, you're not talking small changes that happen every 5 years. Suddenly you have a product that looks alien to an old user, that won't open old document formats, that won't run their macros.
I couldn't think of a stupider thing to do if they tried. They spent all that time killing off the competition and through bone headed moves like this they've just given away all that advantage. I expect alternate suites to start cropping up again. Probably not a bad thing.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Nice tinfoil hat theory - but the contract with Apple to provide MS Office on the Mac expired a while ago (2001/2002). If they really wanted to kill Macs by denying their users Office, why did they even bother to release Office on Mac?
Could it be because they were a monopolist who was convicted of using the monopoly position to harm competitors but now they have a get out of jail card so they no longer have to play nice? If I recall right year ago MS argued it was not a monopoly because they had MS Office for Macs.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The great thing is that we've got a bunch of MS Access "applications" that we can't get funding to re-write properly. Once Office doesn't support VBA, they'll have no choice. We'll then migrate them to unix land and probably Sybase, Oracle, or Postgres.
Allowing business users to have Access is like giving an unsupervised 6 year old a handgun. They can work it, but they have no idea how to be responsible with it and will probably do much more harm than good.