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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.
My personal bet is that they wanted to Office on Mac look less business like. That would stop Macs going to enterprises where (as everybody knows) MSFT has a nice profitable stronghold. Considering how many times I've heard people bitch about using iWork and OpenOffice to do any non-trivial office task, I would say Microsoft is no fear of losing the enterprise office market whether it's on Windows or Mac- business is business.
My theory is this: The project lead was probably a Mac person. He likely believed in adherence to the Apple design guide and tight Mac integration. Therefore, he reasoned that Apple users would be using AppleScript. What he didn't consider was that AppleScript is foul and unusable.
(Side note: It's usable but difficult to remember because of its unnecessarily conversational syntax. At MacHack one year, I remember a core Apple developer trying to show off AppleScript features but continuously fogetting how it works because he was mixing it up with English.)
I see nothing but complaints from people on slashdot, but they're just being retarded as usual. If you're running a mac in a mixed office (pretty common), you're going to be wanting your work to be interoperable without needing a lot of the time and effort you'd otherwise put towards *office things*.
Besides, with the number of Windows and Mac converts and those who use both agnostically, chances are that anyone who has cut their teeth on Microsoft Office is quite proficient in VBA- or at least not wanting to port everything the rest of the office uses into another language.
Besides, the level of VBA integration into Microsoft office is likely so tight that the Mac Office redesign completely broke it and it needs to be re-implemented. If my theory about the project lead being a Mac person is right, then they probably considered it a low priority, the same way all the linux and mac fanboys on here do-- you know, because VBA is a sin, and the guy who designs your spreadsheets at work really cares about the various churches and religions of software platforms.