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.

Four years?

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.

Re:Four years?

I agree. The movement times of things from Microsoft seem to be monumentally slow, and even after taking so long, there's nothing to show for it. They took 5? years between XP and Vista. They didn't really add many true features, and a large proportion of people would rather be running XP. Compare that with Linux Distros, where a new release happens every 6 months. New features are incorporated as they come available, and things can be changed incrementally, because of the frequent releases. My Mandriva box probably has changed quite a bit more than XP to Vista did in the same time frame, but it hasn't been quite as painful because it has been so incremental. Also, I bet they could sell a lot more retail boxes, and make a lot more money if they released every 6 months and charged $30-$40 for each release, rather than release every 5 years, and have nobody buy retail and everybody just get the $50 OEM license. Even if they only get 2 upgrades over the 5 years, they are still pulling in more money than they would only selling OEM licenses.

Re:Four years?

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.

Re:Four years?

You never know, indeed. Linux and Mac may dwarf Windows in four years, but I'm not exactly holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

The one, and just about only, thing we do know for certain about that time span is that Slashdot will proclaim that this is the year for Liunx on the desktop exactly four more times.

Re:Four years?

Even less connected: file format lock-in.

NeoOffice...

...already has support [neooffice.org] for it.

That is _so_ cool

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.

Re:That is _so_ cool

You forgot to mention how lightning-fast VBA is, and the fact that its intuative design encourages good coding practices.

Re:That is _so_ cool

You also forgot to mention how secure it is, and that nobody will ever be able to code macro-viruses with it.

Re:That is _so_ cool

I write VBA routines all the time at work. To an engineer they're invaluable. One of our data acquisition boxes always outputs a fubar CSV style file. I have a script in my personal.xls file that anytime I open one of these files I run this script and it does 10 minutes of cleanup in 10 seconds.

I know that some people write entire programs in Excel but I'd wager that 90% of VBA programs are something written by an engineer or other technical person to make their life easier.

And yes, I know about Matlab. Problem is not everyone has a $10k seat. Everyone has Excel. I'd never publish my code to anyone but as far as making my job easier, you're damn straight I love VBA.

Re:That is _so_ cool

Right. Routines. Not invoicing software that has the business logic, form, and database access rolled in to a single blob. Routines are fine. Single tiering a decidedly multi-tiered application is not.

Those who use VBA deserve Office and Windows

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.

Anything to do with OpenOffice?

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.)

A simple enough reason.

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).

Re:A simple enough reason.

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.

Why change? I'll wait for Office 2010.

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.

Ouch

Visual Basic will be returning to Mac Office.

What did Mac users do to deserve that punishment?

The next Mac/PC ad

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!

We don't need no steenking MS office

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.

Re:Wow

Question is why they dropped it in the first place?
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.

Re:Wow

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.

Re:Wow

Why they didn't write one portable VBA engine for Windows and Mac I don't know.

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.

Re:Feedback

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.

Re:Feedback

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.

Re:Feedback

[...]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.

My Access nightmare has me slowly rocking back and fourth in a ball under my desk as we speak; it's been 'upgraded' since Office '97.
*silently weeps, humming the theme of 'Friends', while balled up and slowly rocking back and fourth under his desk*