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?

[IBBoard]

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.

That is _so_ cool

[cerberusss]

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

[jez9999]

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

Re:Feedback

[bhima]

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:Four years?

[Imsdal]

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:Wow

[ArhcAngel]

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

You must be new here.

Ouch

[HangingChad]

Visual Basic will be returning to Mac Office.

What did Mac users do to deserve that punishment?

The next Mac/PC ad

[Dystopian Rebel]

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!

Re:Feedback

[Gazzonyx]

[...]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*

Re:Anything to do with OpenOffice?

[actionbastard]

Yes it does. MS feels that in three or four years the Mac native version of OpenOffice may be in it's third or fourth beta and nearing first release candidate status for limited testing, so they'd like to get a jump on it.

Re:That is _so_ cool

[Yvan256]

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