Microsoft drops VBA in Mac Office 2007 374
slashdotwriter writes "Macworld features an article stating that the next version of Office for the Mac will not include Visual Basic scripting. From the article: 'Microsoft Office isn't among the apps that will run natively on Intel-based Macs — and it won't be until the latter half of 2007, according to media reports. But when it does ship, Office will apparently be missing a feature so vital to cross-platform compatibility that I believe it will be the beginning of the end for the Mac version of the productivity suite...'"
Re:QUICK!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Ta-daaa! [neooffice.org]
Re:QUICK!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Conversely, I got modded down for linking to NeoOffice [neooffice.org], which is... "based on the OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 code and includes all of the new OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 features".
It's very much a Mac program. Native fonts, copy-and-paste, printing, Aqua interface... Have a look. [planamesa.com]
Must be a slow news day at Slashdot... (Score:5, Informative)
The interesting part is that VBA is not fully supported on the 64-bit Office for Windows, and is in fact depricated, which traditionally means that no further imporovements will be made and further use is discouraged.
Don't believe me? Go search Microsoft's Office site.
Very old news, but typical Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
The people at Microsoft who work within MacBU really do care, and really do take pride in their work. But overall, Microsoft seems to be making moves - decisions not made within MacBU, or decisions forced on MacBU because of resource allocations - that are strategically designed to hurt the Macintosh platform, but not appear to be doing anything overtly.
Examples:
- Killing Mac IE the day Safari was introduced even though Mac IE 6 was well underway and had been in development for over a year and was about to hit beta.
- Never releasing Access, Project, or Visio for the Mac platform even though enterprises (particularly academic institutions) have been increasingly demanding it for years. Microsoft's response? "Our customers don't want these products."
- Killing Windows Media Player for Mac, and making it look like going with the Flip4Mac QuickTime Windows Media codec is doing Mac users a favor, when Flip4Mac will never support Windows Media DRM, which Microsoft views as key to their future Windows Media strategy, leaving Macs unsupported (whether DRM is a good or bad thing is irrelevant to this point).
- Killing Virtual PC for the Mac when the Intel transition was announced after initially committing to support it, even though Microsoft was probably in one of the best positions to quickly release a virtual machine version of Virtual PC (can you imagine Connectix killing Virtual PC after the Intel transition was announced? They'd be jumping for joy!), and then subsequently making Virtual PC free (on Windows).
- Killing Visual Basic in Mac Office, which will make it DOA in many enterprise/corporate environments whose documents depend on VB scripting.
I could go on and on. These are all expert strategic moves, not by MacBU but by Microsoft at large, designed to hurt the Macintosh platform as much as possible while still appearing to be "friendly" to the platform (by continuing to release Office).
Fortunately, with Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop, and the forthcoming VMWare Fusion, new Mac users are feeling increasingly comfortable with Mac purchases, because they know that they can run Windows if they really need to, but often find they don't need it as much as they thought they did. For many, it's a security blanket to get them over the hump, and for others it does enable them to run those Windows (or other x86 OS) applications they need or want to smoothly and efficiently. In many academic/research enterprise environments, many people can't see a reason to get anything OTHER than Mac hardware now (especially for laptops), as it can essentially run anything. And in an environment where an institutions own IT capability will "support" things like Boot Camp usage, it's not a difficult decision to make.
Microsoft's maneuvering will ultimately be futile. Windows "won" the "desktop war" long ago. But now, as with Firefox, people are realizing that there are real, viable alternatives that might actually be better than the status quo.
Re:MS trying to sell more copies of Windows? (Score:2, Informative)
emulation (Score:3, Informative)
This is also part of a trend to limit solutions available on the Mac platform. Over the past 10 years, the products that MS sells for the mac has shrunk. In particular, they buy cross platform products and kill them on the Mac Platform. Virtual PC and Foxpro are two examples. Connectix would have create a version for the Intel Mac. I believe the only reason we have MS Office for the Mac is because MS Office is a mac product, and was only ported to MS Windows.
It is becoming more clear that the casual user should use OO.org
Can Microsoft even *do* this? (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe nobody remembers, but back when Steve Jobs first announced the Intel switch, he also announced a 5-year agreement with Microsoft where MS committed to continuing to release Office for the Mac. Surely Apple's lawyers weren't stupid enough to let MS kneecap the product (which is exactly what it's done) and get away with it, right?
Not to mention that those "expert strategic moves" you mention are also "illegal anticompetitive moves" when carried out by a monopoly convicted of abusing its position, such as Microsoft.
Explanations from MacBU devs (Score:5, Informative)
Note that this was reported months ago, August 7, 2006, to be exact.
Microsoft kills VirtualPC, VB for Mac [macnn.com]
Here's the arstechnica.com forum discussion about it (started on August 7, 2006), with lots of pissed off users:
MS Killing VB in Next Version of Office for Mac [arstechnica.com]
Here are two blogs (Aug 8 and 9) by MacBU devs Erik Schwiebert and Rick Schaut, trying to explain this decision.
Erik Schwiebert - Saying goodbye to Visual Basic [schwieb.com]
Rick Schaut - Virtual PC and Visual Basic [msdn.com]
Re:Too bad for the Mac users. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:bah! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's wrong with X?! (Score:5, Informative)
On top of that, the menu bar is in the wrong place. Most Macs these days are laptops, and a top-of-the-screen menu bar is much easier to hit with a trackpad than a window-attached one. It also wastes less screen real-estate, which is quite precious on a laptop.
Drag and drop don't work properly with X11 applications. Even if Apple did integrate XDND with native drag and drop, most X11 application developers don't really make use of it. I can drag a link from Safari into my terminal and have the URL appear. I can drag the icon from the title bar of a document window into an email, and have it become an attachment.
X11 applications don't have access to text services (unless they use GNUstep, and then they should just be linked against Cocoa, instead of run in X11). In a normal rich text box, I can select some text, hit a shortcut key, and have it typeset using LaTeX and inserted as a PDF (great for equations in presentations), or have it evaluated as a mathematical expression, or have the words counted, etc.
All the shortcut keys are wrong in X11 applications. Most X11 developers these days use control or alt, instead of meta, and so motor memory doesn't work for common operations.
Re:QUICK!!! (Score:3, Informative)
What do Mac users think of ODF? (Score:4, Informative)
As you may know, there is an ms-office plugin for ODF, but there is not a way to read ms-office-2007 file formats on Mac. And there will not be a way until, at least, late march.
Just wondering what you guys think.
Re:iWork '07 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DOJ should've split M$ apart after conviction . (Score:2, Informative)
VBA is quite powerful within Office and can be used to make great bespoke software solutions. Loosing that functionality could be quite risky for Microsoft.
Not that it's a problem, of course. Businesses don't often leap into new technology. We've just completed a migration of 120,000 NT workstations to XP for a government branch in the UK, just as Vista is released and Microsoft Office 2007.
Re:Let's Be Honest (Score:3, Informative)
Written like a true corporate I.T. coward with little understanding of the big picture and less understanding of what his customers (the users) actually need to accomplish their jobs
See my post above [slashdot.org] for why this is a big deal. Dropping support for this feature is just one more step on a long march to kill off anything that's not a secretary's tool for Windows in the corporate space.
Yes! (Score:3, Informative)
Went and found myself a trial version and it looks like the answer is yes. I would imagine this is one of the making MS wonder whether there is any need to continue their effort.
Re:What's wrong with X?! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's wrong with X?! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who uses VBA anyway (Score:2, Informative)
Sorry, but I'm not going to hire a consultant every time one of my end users wants to build a simple database to sort vendor contacts. Nor am I going to bog down the programmers on staff with spreadsheet macros for HR.
for the non-programmer (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, a lot of the code that actually comprehends the VB programming language is actually tangled up in the GUI code. Second, the code has huge blocks of code that are written in processor-specific assembly. That means that they either have to fundamentally redesign the entire product or maintain separate versions for all of the different processors they support (32-bit PPC, 32-bit x86, 64-bit x86). Third, he rules out the possibility of porting the windows version of VBA over to the mac because the damn thing actually makes assumptions about how the actual
When I first read the article, I thought it stunk to high heaven of Microsoft trying to gimp Apple. I still believe this is going to be a huge headache for Apple users who rely on extensive cross-compatibility, but unless that blog is a large-scale, deliberate, malicious fabrication, VBA is really an ungodly mess of an application.
Who would have guessed?
It's not us that have a problem with it... (Score:3, Informative)
How Microsoft profits off of Intel Macs... (Score:2, Informative)
With Parallels or BootCamp, I -can- run Windows and Windows Office on my Mac. But at what cost??? Dell pays peanuts for Windows/Office on each machine it ships. Me, I'll have to buy retail. Office XP Pro costs $300 (I just priced it out for -this very reason-.) That'a an appalling amount of money for (bad) software. Office on Windows retail probably costs a similar amount. Corporate IT tells me "Oh, we -never- buy software from Microsoft. We always get our machines equipped by the OE(hardware)M."
Good strategy if you're a Microsoft stockholder.
But the previous comments about the antitrust "oversight" of Microsoft applies here, and I find Office a much more insidious monopoly than Windows ever was...
dave
Re:Typical Microsoft Tactics at work (Score:3, Informative)
It even shows a warning in the installer dialog when you choose to install the older versions of Office. It says something about how they're supported, but that there are usually glitches with those versions. I've not seen a glitch yet, though, and I use Office 2000. Rarely.
Re:What's wrong with X?! (Score:2, Informative)
http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdebase/kcontrol/de
Look for "Menu Bar at Top of Screen"
Re:Fix java first (Score:3, Informative)
That said, gcj can compile Eclipse to native code, in which case it's pretty fast.
Re:Pardon my ignorance... (Score:3, Informative)
Go to "System Prferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts", and you can add or redefine any application's keyboard shortcuts. I mean, just in case you're on a Mac sometime and want a "usable computing environment".
And it would appear that Apple isn't the only system with fanbois...
Re:Pardon my ignorance... (Score:2, Informative)
Same thing if you write for OSX' carbon or cocoa, or whatever the hell it's called.