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VBA Will Return To Mac Office

Posted by kdawson on from the end-of-a-crack-the-whip-chain dept.

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.

3 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wow by Zelos · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Anything to do with OpenOffice? by ais523 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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  3. Re:Four years? by random0xff · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.