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Office 15 Development To Go JavaScript, HTML5 For Extensibility
mikejuk writes "Programmers have had to put up with Microsoft dithering over Office development for a long while. The macro language VBA has been on its way out ever since .NET was introduced and yet it is still the only macro language available. Now it looks as if Microsoft plan to put JavaScript and HTML5 into Office 15. And how do we know this? By reading job ads to discover what projects Microsoft is hiring for."
HTML pages are documents. JavaScript is a full-blown programming language inside documents. It makes good sense.
And everything, but isn't this a bit too much?
Remember when Windows tried to 'integrate' with the web - I think it was Windows 98...
Is HTML and JS really the best tool for this job? Is it the best tool for all the jobs MS is intending it to be used for?
Why does anyone need a programming language embedded in documents? Seems like that would be ripe for potential security/privacy violations, viruses, etc.
Office already has reasonable security controls over VBA macros. They aren't executed automatically if a document came from an untrusted source. Like so many things, if you're going to willfully execute malicious code, nobody can help you. But the problem of Word macro viruses and the like has been around for a long time and has largely been addressed by a combination of modern antivirus software and Office's own security controls.
That said, if I want to write macros to make my use of Office more efficient, who are you to say it's a bad idea? I'm not going to write macros that violate my own security or privacy. I have VBA macros that I use every time I open Word. I've written macros for Photoshop as well -- the difference being, those are written in JavaScript. I'd be more than happy to translate my VBA macros away from that rather shoddy and awkward language into a language that I use all the time for all sorts of things.
Breakfast served all day!
Link to an external JS or not, the fact of the matter is that when the page ends up in the browser they both / all reside within the same DOM. Your ivory tower view of how things should be is commendable, but not workable in the real world.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
You would be surprised how much business logic companies tend to squeeze into office documents, especially excel documents. I'd go as far as saying most of the world runs on excel sheets + VBA. Horrible but true.
You probably didn't know that Tools > Macros >Visual Basic Editor is the world's most popular IDE.
There are full blown Win32 applications that run out of Excel spreadsheets.
Crazy, but true.
You would be surprised how much business logic companies tend to squeeze into office documents, especially excel documents. I'd go as far as saying most of the world runs on excel sheets + VBA. Horrible but true.
This is so horrible and yet so true, I've seen excel documents being used for an insane variety of purposes, from simple event monitoring to full CRM & Payroll
My dad was bored one day, so he wrote Stock Ticker (the old board game) in a spreadsheet.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
I find it far more likely that this has something to do with Office 365: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/online-software.aspx
"The urge to fly from modern systems, instead of moving through them to even greater, fairer things is, I think, an indi
.NET can still be used through Interop and the like. This looks to be aimed at the level of people who need to build stuff but don't have VS of one form or another. Another option would have been to pair a baby VSTO with the Express editions of VS.
No it doesn't. Javascript definitely does not belong in an HTML file. It belongs as a separate file so that you can actually make sure that it's updated rather than hoping that it doesn't get screwed up when you want to change the HTML.
Programming in documents is a serious security problem that ought to have been fixed years ago. If you need interactivity, then use an external program, otherwise let's keep the bugs to things that are actually unavoidable.
You are just arguing semantics with the separate document thing. The Office Document format is now composed of multiple files inside a single logical document file. The scripting could easily be moved out of the content file and be stored as a separate entity. Users obviously want this functionality, or documents using it wouldn't exist in the first place.
Please try someday Matlab or its open source clone Octave.
this is pretty true, at one point we were pretty much told to nuke any spreadsheets we could find and roll the functionality into our other applications, after seeing some of the absolutely required and totally horrific functionality built into some of these bad boys we pretty much turn the other cheek a lot of the time.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Would surely require MSJavascript combined with MSHtml5?
Please try to see this as not a troll but a concerned citizen?
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
I highly doubt Microsoft would get rid of VBA. It is the evil and glue that keeps customers locked in and gives PHB's who hate I.T. woodys who want to develop things quick and dirty in Excel rather than a real IDE.
Windows 8 has a problem with MS Office. If you notice closely in those video's the pretty tiled Metro UI loads but the demonstrators have to open the Windows 7 gui to actually open Excel.
So MS wants Office 15 to have a tile UI which needs HTML 5 and Javascript. I could be wrong, but I did find that pecular and in the demo videos and wondered if it was intentional that Corporate America would prefer the old GUI or if MS did not update the GUI code for Office yet.
http://saveie6.com/