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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.
I think the reason they gave was that it was too hard to port the old Office 2004 VBA runtime from PPC to x86 code - the runtime was apparently an absolute mess that was tied very tightly to the ISA. Why they didn't write one portable VBA engine for Windows and Mac I don't know.
Whether that's true or not I don't know, it's the old choice between assuming incompetence or malice I guess.
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.)
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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.
Does the Office department realise that Microsoft has a runtime on the Mac? It's called the Dynamic Language Runtime and it will run JavaScript, Ruby, Python and something called VBX (whatever that is). Wouldn't it be a better idea to use that and build libraries for it. There's already Office libraries for .NET so it seems the smartest thing to do.
Of course, that would be awfully cross platform and that's a scray thing for Microsoft.
Probably because VBA was introduced around 1993, the same year the first Pentium (running at 60MHz) was introduced. The typical machine had a 486DX2 running a single instruction pipeline at 33MHz, and maybe 16-24MB of RAM. Oh, yes, and Windows 3.1, which is 16 bit and has all its 16 bit glory.
Still, C code can be reasonably close to assembler in efficiency, especially if you profile and use assembler only in tight loops. It shouldn't be that hard on modern systems to cross compile to C against some kind of simple virtual machine.
I'm guessing that the code probably makes a lot of direct Windows API calls without any framework or abstraction. This probably means that collectively the VBA code for MacOS and Windows is significantly larger than for Windows alone. If this is true Microsoft would have to port a lot of the Windows API to MacOS (nobody is better positioned to do this), or they have to do a rather massive refactoring. Since porting the API is undesirable for other reasons, and refactoring is desirable for others, I'm guessing they're planning on cleaning things up enough to make a Mac port viable.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No kidding. I'm actually a paid Office:Mac user (albeit a previous version) and I still use Neo Office. Other than being slow to load, it does everything I want it to, and it's free.
Unless you have some special need for Microsoft Office that Neo Office doesn't meet, I don't see any reason to pay for Microsoft Office other than just not knowing any better.
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