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VBA Will Return To Mac Office
An anonymous reader sends a pointer to Erik Schwiebert's blog — he's the design lead of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit — where he announces that Visual Basic will be returning to Mac Office. Not in Office 2008, which started shipping earlier this year. We discussed the announced death of VBA in Mac Office 17 months back. Schwiebert says that the interval to the next version of Mac Office will be shorter than 4 years but isn't able to offer any more detail. The blog post calls for feedback on what features of VBA and Windows interoperability are most important to people.
Shorter than four years? Now there's commitment to a schedule!
You never know, by that time ODF might be a highly used standard, Linux and Mac might have dwarfed Windows, and MS Office might have been replaced in a lot of office environments.
Adding features that have been dropped in Windows in favour of newer and better ones? That's nice. I suppose it saves them porting .Net over to the mac.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
...already has support for it.
That is just _so_ cool. I'm absolutely dying to help my customers by creating cross-platform applications in VBA. They will enjoy all the goodness and richness of the Microsoft Office platform, with 86 MB single-user OLE files, spreadsheets/graphics/mail-merge/database-monster all rolled into one. On a share. So everyone can use it.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Microsoft decides when it's time to kill Foxpro, when to drop support for old versions etc. Hitching a company's business to Microsoft tools like Access, Excel, Sharepoint and VBA... keeps them on the upgrade treadmill forever. It should teach the Corporate beancounters to go for standards-based tools and programming languages instead.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Features are important? How about making it so some middle manager can not make some MS Access app and then have upper management have you deploy it for 100+ users to use.
The number of fricking POS Access applications I had to support that were coded so badly that it took days to figure out what the person was trying to do is insane. Corporate america is riddled with these kind of monsters causing IT people to ball up under their desks and cry through the night.
I was happy when they removed VBA because it stopped that nightmare.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that the OpenOffice 3 announcements were made, including partial VBA support for the Mac version? Microsoft seem to be happy to drop VBA support from the Mac version to try to persuade people who rely on it to switch to Windows, but to add it back when that reason no longer applies, so as not to lose marketshare to the reason that it no longer applies... (And yes, there were other office suites that could do that beforehand, but businesses are at least likely to have heard of OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.)
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
They now have to differentiate themselves from other office suites on the Mac that are free and can read/write .doc files (not to mention much cheaper than Office:Mac).
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The blog post calls for feedback on what features of VBA and Windows interoperability are most important to people.
One of the things I dislike about MS products is bloat. Features I don't need only serve to get in my way and waste memory and drive space. Getting rid of unneeded bloat is a good thing.
OTOH another thing I dislike about MS is its seeming inability to work and play well with others. If they're going to remove interoperability thay've already accomplished (by accident?), that's not a good thing.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Access? You're lucky those folks in my company uses Excel for their databases and labview for hardware control and DAQ... It's like watching a train wreck on herion.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I should think all of them, since interoperability with Office for Windows is the only reason there is for spending a lot of money on Office for Mac instead of spending a lot less money on either a cheaper commercial alternative (Pages, Mariner Write, etc) or using an open source alternative (FINALLY Open Office is getting around to an Aqua version).
There is simply no compelling reason for me or my organization to deploy the new version of Office - why spend thousands for new licenses (and associated deployment and support) when I can stick with the tried-and-true 2004 and just wait a couple years for "Office 2010"?
I find that Office 2004 is quite a bit faster than Office 2008 on my Intel-based MacBook. I'm not sure what they did to it, but it isn't impressive in terms of performance. You'd think that converting from translated PPC code to native x86 code would be a huge performance advantage, but somehow the Microsoft managed to slow it down quite a bit.
Oh, and Office 2008 has fewer features, like no VBA.
What was Microsoft thinking during design and testing? Clearly they have totally lost focus and ability to release a decent product.
What interoperability features I want? All of them. Except for the interoperability features that are really bugs.
Seriously, the only point of Office on Mac is to be able not to buy a windows license. If Microsoft isn't willing to do a feature complete replacement, maybe they should just rethink it and not sell Office for Mac if they can't swing it. They don't want to, because unless they port the bugs too, that makes office for mac better than office for windows, for certain values of "office for mac specific bugs".
Let me guess, when this comes back it won't just be VBA, it will be something vb.net-ish? This is just like when Coke introduced New Coke then returned with "Classic Coke" but used corn surup instead of sugar!
Visual Basic will be returning to Mac Office.
What did Mac users do to deserve that punishment?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Microsoft if fighting a battle against becoming irrelevant. On one hand their products are hindered by backwards compatibility required by the business community, yet on another hand, their products are becoming irrelevant thanks to web platforms like Google apps, and virtualization tools like Parallels and VMware.
If Microsoft cuts their ties with "old-school" software like VBA, ActiveX, and 16-bit dos-era software to improve their current offerings, they slit their throats with the business community - it will force their "cash base" of customers to find something new - and it probably won't be a Microsoft product.
If Microsoft does not cut their ties with old-school software, the development cost of keeping the backwards compatibility causes their current software to stagnate compared to the dynamic offerings of Apple, Google, and the open source community.
Microsoft is becoming less relevant by the day. I see it at my company and many others.
-ted
How's lumpy lucky that your folks use Excel for a database?
MAC: Hello, I'm a Mac.
PC: [surrounded by noisy children] Hello, I'm a PC. Ha ha ha!
MAC: PC, it's good to see you laughing. Who are all your friends?
PC: [children are poking and pinching PC] Oh them? Ouch! Ha ha ha! They are Script Kiddies! Ouch! Ha ha ha!
MAC: Script Kiddies? What do they do?
PC: Now that VBA, the Enterprise Virus Development Platform, will soon be available on Office for Mac, you are about to find out. Ouch! Ha ha ha!
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
With NeoOffice and OO.org many Mac users already feel we have no more need of MS office. In four years' time, that will only be more true. The end of MS' monopoly on business software is definitely in sight now, and they brought it about themselves with their greed, over-confidence, and short-sighted policies.
It wasn't so long ago I pretty much had to use MS software on my Mac to do all I needed to do -- WMP, Office, IE. Today, the only MS code on my Mac is codecs for wmv and wma files (which I play in mplayer). This is real progress, and we owe a big debt of gratitude it to the FOSS guys.
Caveat Utilitor
>... causing IT people to ball up under their desks and cry through the night
Hey, it's not just America. And far from balling up under my desk I simply do the crappy work turning this sort of gloop into a (reasonably) decent C#, SqlServer, ASP.Net solution (If a place is using Access they want a Microsoft replacement...)
Then I go home and do some "proper" coding on my Linux box after which I can go to sleep on my great big pile of money that I got paid for dealing with the gloop.
Seriously I *LOVE* crappy, ill thought out Access and VBA apps. They're making me rich I tell you, rich !!!
While VBA is certainly helpful, there are higher priority repairs necessary to Office for Mac. Approximately 75% of all Windows Office features are dysfunctional in Office Mac. They are too numerous to list, but include hot button commands in all applications and many macro commands. Excel features are entirely missing quite often.
One missing feature that would set Office apart from its competitors is a more robust parsing application. While PERL is ideal for that kind of operation, and Word can be used to some extent, it would be better if Word's parsing (Replacement command) was more complete. This is helpful for moving and translating content from one format to another.
*silently weeps, humming the theme of 'Friends', while balled up and slowly rocking back and fourth under his desk*
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
what features of VBA and Windows interoperability are most important to people.
Let me see.... all of them?
When I was writing VBA for Excel spreadsheets, I had this really great book on it (VBA for Excel), but many of the examples simply didn't work. This was mostly because of differences between VBA versions (I believe the windows version was 6 at the time, but the mac version was 4, but I could be way off... this is 4 years ago, I'm talking about).
This caused me to have extreme issues not only learning the language and techniques, but also in making sure a workbook that I created in windows would work in OSX and vice versa.
The vast majority of UI features were missing including many aspects of creating dropdown menus easily.
Also, the mac version ran several orders of magnitude slower:
I created a workbook that would import EZPass usage tables from the website and sort, find anomolies and colorize the output. Once the data was in the sheet, to do the aforementioned task was instantaneous in windows, but on the mac took over a minute. This is after I disabled window updates and implemented other performance enhancing tricks.
In the end, I wound up creating a webapp that would fetch the data, dump it to a file and have a perl script that would parse it and email a CSV file to be imported into excel for the boss. It didn't have the pretty colors (they wanted an excel file in the end, not just display in a browser), but it worked faster and required less user interaction.
so yeah, make the mac version of excel match the windows version. Afterall, isn't interoperability the point of having a multi-platform application?
Oh yeah, Microsoft's reason is to make money... and frustrate mac users into getting a windows box just to have a [more] pleasant experience (if you can call it that) with Office.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Vincent B. Anschutz is back working in the Mac office? Wow, he's been gone for quite awhile. It's good to see him return.
The reason for this coming back is that customers asked for it. Many customers have old VB code in documents that they either cannot or will not convert. This gives them a way to regain some functionality.
Since switching to using a Mac at work last summer, I've been pretty happy, except for the god-awful problems with Mac Office. It's my one remaining annoyance on OS X. Office 2004 was so slow on my Mac (a 2.4 ghz core duo MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of RAM) that opening any Word doc longer than four or five pages caused massive hiccups. Trying to open things that contained images or (god forbid) had "Track changes" enabled - well, forget it. When Office '08 was released I was happy - until I installed it.
'04 might be slow, but '08 randomly causes hard system freezes (mouse responsive, but nothing else works - forces me to reboot). No real pattern to it, either. Has never happened unless an Office program is open. Missing VBA is not so bad for Word unless you count the subsequent loss of all plug-ins, including EndNote - which as a scientist I really can't live without. Not to mention the problems with Excel, which is where I assume 90% of the VBA complains have come from. So many Excel spreadsheets rely on macros to work properly. And the user interface? The changes in Office 08 might seem like improvements for anyone that has never used Office on Windows, but going from 07 at home to 08 at work makes me want to tear my hair out. The floating "toolbox" palette is horrible and unusable, but the floating, undockable Formula bar in Excel - how did that actually make it past quality control?
The most damning thing about this all is that they are charging MORE for Mac Office than they are for Office 07 - more money for fewer programs (no OneNote, for example, no Access, no real Outlook compatibility - Entourage is not Outlook, thank god I don't have to use either, but many people need it). More money for what are essentially broken components (half the known issues with Office 08 are compatibility problems with 07, plus the loss of VBA that has caused so many problems). And now they are telling us that our problems will be solved, so long as we will just wait a few years and then hand them even more money?
There are reasons I have NeoOffice installed, and 90% of those reasons are the idiotic decisions made by the Mac BU. As much as I like open source, I would be perfectly happy using Microsoft Office if they would deliver on the Mac the same functionality they offer on Windows - but if Microsoft won't deliver, my money is going elsewhere. I have a hard time thinking I'd be the only one making the same decision.
I have to agree with a lot of the other posters in that Microsoft's only advantage was (is?) 100% compatibility with PC Office, which since Office 98 has slowly been chipped away. Office 98 was not only highly (if not 100%) compatible with Office for PC, but it was almost identical at the UI level. This was really nice for students in Mac schools because they could get the MS Office training to get a job someday rather than take Computer Applications 101 on Claris Works, because there are so many people that learn by contrete example (writing down steps) rather than computing concepts and general usage.
However, in later versions, Office for Mac has become more uncompatible (Mac only stuff that doesn't port to PC, PC only stuff that doesn't port to Mac), that there really is no reason to pay the hefty MS pricetag over Open Office.org. Even the "the UI is the same so our 'special' users can figure it out on a different platform" argument is gone.
As much as I hate to say it, Macro compatibility was their *last* stride above the competition (aside from brand recognition) and without that MS Office Mac is really just one of many implementations that gives the "kind of works" compatibility competiting (free or commercial) products already give.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
Out of curiousity, have you (or has anyone) actually seen *any* version of OpenOffice that will open and run spreadsheets with VBA? I keep hearing vague claims about VBA compatibility (what the heck is "partial VBA support"??), but every version of OO I've tried (including 3.0 beta for Windows) chokes on my VBA spreadsheets. I was able to port these spreadsheets to Starbasic leaving 90% of the code unchanged (and with a *lot* of help from the forums at Openoffice.org). But I have yet to see any reasonable out of the box compatibility.
For the record, my spreadsheets primarily contain user-defined functions (and a few subroutines) that call built-in Excel functions that exist in OO (such as NormSInv), and they read and write to named cells. Not trivial, but not rocket science, as VBA goes.
You're a complete sucker if you decide to build something on top of Office For Mac. Fool-me-once and all that. Any IT decision maker that places their bets (and invests) in this technology simply doesn't understand business.
MS has done exactly what they intended: disable people's confidence in the Mac (or at least, in Office For Mac). What they didn't expect is that there'd be viable replacements for the Mac.
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
Are there any IT shops out there that think these technologies are NOT a huge corporate liability???
What do I want in Office? How about consistency in the layout of a document, for starters? Every version (Mac or PC) seems to make slightly different approximations, resulting in differences in where page breaks or text/picture frames end up every once in a while. Used to be way worse, but it's still not perfect. How about consistency in the use of special characters between Mac and PC? If I type pi (the lowercase Greek letter, using the Symbol font) in a Mac, I expect it to read as pi on a PC. And vice versa.
And if MS listed to this demand, why are they so deaf to keeping XP available through at least the next Windows upgrade?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I wish they didn't or that it was more of an even split between MS Winbloze, Linux and Mac, but it's not.
VBA being removed from Mac Office didn't make any difference to the vast majority of Corporate America. It did, however, make a difference to a very tiny fraction of 8% of the entire global market computer market who use Mac and consult with or for Corporate America and need to interact with them.
In the end, we're talking about a very, very small number of people in relation to the rest of the computing world who really cares or is even effected by VBA in Mac Office.
Had some problems with Filevault not deleting encrypted images upon waking from sleep... anyways I had to reinstall the OS, and had lost my Office Mac CD, so I installed NeoOffice, intending to buy a new copy if I ran into any major problems. That was about two years ago.
Some % of their Windows corporate sales depend on there being a mostly-compatible Mac version.
This was probably a bigger deal 15 years ago, but it was always an advantage that MS had over their competitors.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Access was NEVER available on the Mac so all you did is just prove that you are a clueless idiot.
years. I know that this has been said before and that I'm not the first person to say it but I think that Microsoft is going to be in for rough times because of Vista and because of the speed of the PC hardware that has been released over the last six years.
Five years ago I built my parents new PCs based upon AMD CPUs and ASUS motherboards and running Windows XP. Since then I have upgraded the RAM on their systems out to the max of 1.5Gb and they still run just fine, my Dad has a few newer games that are a bit slow, but applications such as Office, IE, FireFox, Adobe, TurboCAD, etc run just fine under XP. My laptop at work is almost four years old, I've had more memory installed and a larger hard drive but again, it works just fine with Office, etc under Windows XP. Newer hardware offers more bells and whistles but unless you're doing video work, or playing games a decent system put together in 2003 or 2004 will run XP just fine. No one I know on the Windows side of the IT world is looking forward to upgrading to Vista because in order to do so we'd have to junk a bunch of perfectly good systems to install an OS that brings no benefit in a business environment. Business users don't need Aero glass, they don't need Vista's multimedia features (because businesses feel that if you want to do cool multimedia stuff you should do it at home and not be fucking off and doing it at work), they don't need Vista's "improved" security because any business that has an IT department that's worth it's salary are already behind firewalls, scan all incoming e-mails for viruses, automatically install security upgrades on user desktops and laptops and otherwise check their networks for infected systems and because the help desk guys really don't want to spend their entire day answering questions inspired by Vista's UAC spamming end users with largely spurious security notifications.
The only reason why anyone is buying Vista is because they have to. Dell just informed us today that as of tomorrow XP is no longer available as an OEM installed OS. You can still get it from Dell, but you're actually buying Vista with a "Downgrade Rights" license that allows you to install XP but with a Vista license. The "Downgrade Rights" program will be available until December 31st, 2010, so Microsoft will be able to say that they're selling lots and lots of copies of Vista when in reality many of these copies of Vista will actually be copies of XP sold under the "Downgrade Rights" program.
Pause and think for a moment upon how fucked up this is. Microsoft came out with a new operating system that no one wants; they tried to force adoption of the new OS by end of lifing the old one, but there was so much push back that they first had to extend the end of life date and then had to compromise and come out with the "Downgrade Rights" program which basically says that they're selling XP until New Year's Eve, 2010. Microsoft is fucked because they couldn't just keep selling XP, if they did it would be an implicit admission on their part that Vista is a failure. Microsoft also can't just say to customers "Fuck you, we're not selling XP any more, if you need an OS it's Vista or the highway" because if they did business customers in search of new systems might just say "Fuck it. I'll try the highway then. I'll keep my XP systems running as long as I can (which given the current economic climate isn't a bad idea anyways) and when I hit the wall where they don't run any more look at buying Macs or running Linux on the desktop."
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
My comment was meant to highlight the large number of competitors that Microsoft never had before.
Google, Apple, and the open source community now have entire application platforms that can compete with Microsoft.
Does this mean that all the networks built in the last 20 years will, overnight, switch to something else? No. What it does mean is that slowly as new systems are evaluated and rolled out, Microsoft is being considered less and less.
Just yesterday we rolled out OpenFire as our internal IM system. We considered Sharepoint, but it was bigger and more expensive than we needed. iChat server could not integrate with our directory system (despite what Apple docs say).
Microsoft losing mindshare to others should not be a surprise - when you have Microsoft's marketshare, the only direction you can realistically go is down.
-ted
Sweet!
Another reason to not use Office, I could instead just use open office or google docs instead.
Oh did I mention it was free too.
No thanks, Micro$oft I will choose the alternatives.