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...'"
QUICK!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:QUICK!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Ta-daaa! [neooffice.org]
Re:QUICK!!! (Score:5, Funny)
"Double-Clickey-Wait-Wait-Wait-Wait-Typey-Typey-W
Re:QUICK!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:QUICK!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Fix java first (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenOffice is working on an Aqua version [openoffice.org] that can run natively on OSX. I suppose that will run faster than NeoOffice.
From their mission statement:
For me, NeoOffice wo
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That said, gcj can compile Eclipse to native code, in which case it's pretty fast.
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Most linux distros ship the native version. I think that on OS X you're locked into Apple's JVM (for the Cocoa widgets, etc.), and Apple's JVM just isn't particularly good. It's not fast, and it won't emit native code. (So try Eclipse on Windows or Linux with a Sun or IBM JIT JVM. Much nicer.)
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How QUICK is NeoOffice? Is it faster than OOo is on Linux? ON my box, OOo takes up to 1.5 minutes to get its ass away, just to get to a blank screen. And, no, I don't run that little cheat/kudge quick-start thing. And this is with a MINIMUM of anything else open. Even Win4Lin 4.x is not invoked at this point. But, since Lotus SmartSuite from 1986-2002
Just for stability? (Score:3, Insightful)
To get OO-Writer to do the same, I have to be running a cruddy video driver for an odd card, & seg-fault Writer via that.
I alse regularly use & recommend Writer for recovering "broken" MS-Word documents.
On a number of occasions, I've had time-critical documents shipped from the US or UK arrive unreadable in MS-Office, but read & edit fine & dandy under OpemOffice. I also ship documents in several forms, & a few t
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This saved one of my co-workers untold grief retyping the file.
Go Open Office!
And, btw, Calc at least starts up in just a few seconds on an Ubuntu 6.10 VM with 512 Megs in Parallels on a Mac Mini Core Duo 1.66
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You mean other than, apparently, not using the men bar?
What's wrong with X?! (Score:2, Insightful)
I've always found it ridiculous how Mac users don't like running cross-platform applications under X. X is a standard for windowing on *nix systems, even if it's old and a little broken. If it's such a big deal, why doesn't Apple integrate Aqua and X better? And in terms of printing, Mac OS X uses CUPS, which is the same thing most people use on Linu
Re:What's wrong with X?! (Score:5, Insightful)
seems you answered your own question.
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:What's wrong with X?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Few write for "X" (x.org) they actually write for gtk+, kde-libs, or opengl? and such. Many (expecially kde-libs) of these desktop libraries provide very standardized widgets and shortcuts. Most of these shortcuts are exactly like those on Windows.
I don't really understand what you mean by navigation shortcuts to widgets so if you can explain further...
Anyway, things like native look and feel, and unique position of the menubar (which I still dislike after years of use) fall into the realm of the theme engine and the window manager. Here is a example to show that it _could_ be done...
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=241868 [ubuntuforums.org]
"Drag and drop..."
I think this is also a desktop library thing and for me it works great. I use kmail which is a KDE application; I run Xfce as my desktop and D&D files from my file browser to new emails all the time. These are applications using TWO completely different desktop libraries but they do D&D amazingly well. But I agree that this area needs to be worked on. There are certain times the action taken is predictable but different from the expected.
"X11 applications don't have access to text services..."
I will give you this one. I like this feature in OSX, and haven't found a true equivalent in either Windows or Linux. I think this level of cooperation between applications is something you will easily get in one vendor environments and is extremely slow to develop in scattered systems like open source.
"All the shortcut keys are wrong in X11..."
This is matter of opinion, and personally, I have found the Mac shortcuts to be a PAIN. I like the Windows and KDE shortcuts far better. Especially for Windows, there is much more standardization in third party apps. For the core Mac applications, it is amazing, but it totally falls apart when you leave these applications. I hate developing with Dreamweaver and such for Mac. For me it boils down to shortcut-to-expected action without thought, and it is far better in the Windows realm than Mac. In Mac, I always need to think "ok, what application am I using..." It only takes a microsecond longer, but when I am using 4-5 applications each with 2-5 windows, it ends up being equivalent to using the mouse.
Ok, to summarize, what Apple really needs to do is develop their own theme engine and window manager for kde/gtk. Also, they can provide a translation layer for D&D to and from kde/gtk applications. This will solve 80% of your issues. Apple is closed source, therefore, they are in a much better position to make such software; they owe it to their customer base. There are open source projects that do much of this, but they can never get to the level that Apple can, and you can't expect too much from them as they are developing for a very small market.
Personally, I use Mac, Windows, and Gentoo Linux. I use OSX the least, but have used it for the last 2 years. I find it very... pleasant to use for things like browsing, essays, and image development. I like Linux for programming and cross platform application development. Windows, kind of falls somewhere in between leaning toward Linux. Overall, basic things are great on the Mac, but more complicated things are irritating to do, and the "obviousness" type stuff actually gets in the way of multitasking and feature access.
Re: What's wrong with X?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Standardisation in Windows apps? That's a laugh...
Let's take just one example which bugs me every day I have to use Windows at work: Find again. In many apps I want to go through a page, stopping at each instance of a particular string. In most cases, you start off by pressing Ctrl+F for Find. But once you've found the first match, what do you do to skip to the next? Oh, that's easy, you press Ctrl+G. Except it's not. Sometimes it's Ctrl+Y (Y? Goodness knows.) Sometimes it's that nice memorable F3. And sometimes you can't do it at all; you have to keep the Find dialog visible, which means you have to reach for the mouse every time you switch between going to the next match and editing it. I am *forever* forgetting which strange method of control to use in which app.
And that's just one single almost-universal action, across a small handful of common big-name Windows apps I use every day. Compare that to the Mac, where it's Cmd+G in every app I've come across. And repeat across tons of other little shortcuts and common actions.
'Standardisation'? Hah.
Re:What's wrong with X?! (Score:4, Insightful)
What cross-platform development? I am a full-time J2SE/J2EE developer and I develop %100 of the time in OS X. OS X is by far the best Java development platform I have ever used, especially considering that Java is a first-tier language included with the OS, and easily exceeding Windows and Linux (especially considering the continual reconfiguration and dependency hell that is Linux). For OS X specific applications, Objective C in XCode is actually quite easy and intuitive to use, with XCode being an excellent IDE. For Windows-specific development, I run a copy of Windows in Parallels. If I was not able to use OS X, I would use Linux and configure it heavily to work like OS X, and would do everything I could to not use Windows for development. But, from what you say, it is obvious you do no actual development on any platform, especially not OS X.
Windows, kind of falls somewhere in between leaning toward Linux. Overall, basic things are great on the Mac, but more complicated things are irritating to do, and the "obviousness" type stuff actually gets in the way of multitasking and feature access.
Obviousness? Is that even a word? Putting that aside, what "obviousness" are you talking about? I cannot think of a single obvious task in OS X that somehow gets in the way of multitasking and feature access. Most newbies tend to complain about shortcut keys, but do not make the effort to look them up (they are even online) or turn them on globally in the preferences for all applications and dialogs. And since you are complaining about shortcut keys in applications, it not only shows that you are obviously a newbie, but that you are complaining about a problem which is not specific to OS X. All of the OS X shortcut keys are standardized and logical. If there is a non-standard shortcut key in a specific application, then it is a vendor issue and not an OS X issue. If you are complaining about something other than shortcut keys, then you will be just as full of shit about that as you are about everything else.
Ok, to summarize, what Apple really needs to do is develop their own theme engine and window manager for kde/gtk. Also, they can provide a translation layer for D&D to and from kde/gtk applications. This will solve 80% of your issues. Apple is closed source, therefore, they are in a much better position to make such software; they owe it to their customer base. There are open source projects that do much of this, but they can never get to the level that Apple can, and you can't expect too much from them as they are developing for a very small market.
There are few completely incorrect points here, so I'll hit the big ones. First, Apple needs to develop software and SDK's for the development of OS X specific applications and truly cross-platform applications like Java. Apple does not need to make Linux programs compatible whatsoever. If a Linux program wants to run on OS X, then the Linux program should change to accommodate, Apple makes the API available for programmers to use in a multitude of languages. Apple does not somehow owe Linux compatibility to anyone. And marketshare doesn't mean shit to well qualified and driven developers. How many main developers does it take to make OpenOffice into NeoOffice? Two.
What your post really says is that you use Linux and Windows on a PC. You have seen screenshots of OS X, possibly even used it a minute or two in an Apple store, and get the rest of your OS X information from linux.slashdot.org. You should use OS X full-time before writing reviews of it for other people on Slashdot who have never used OS X before either.
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There's nothing wrong with those things at all. They're just not part of the default OS X gui.
Your second sentence contradicts your first. Look, Mac users expect a consistent, good looking gui. OpenOffice will not be popular on the Mac unless it looks like a Mac App. Heck, a lot of Carbon-based Apps are looked down upon because they do not look as good as the Cocoa Apps.
This is a golden opportunity for OpenOffice, but if the attitude that non-native UI isn't a big deal, then I don't have high hopes.
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Not really complaining. Just telling you that not having a native GUI version on a platform that prides itself on the GUI is a non-starter. It really is that simple. You see, the end user won't know about these "standards" for UNIX-derived systems, they will just see an interface that looks and act different which requires an additional piece of software to run. Trying to convince end-users they are wrong or stupid for their choice of platforms doesn't really work very well. In fact, it works about as
Re:What's wrong with X?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Choosing function over form means choosing a good user interface. Choosing form over function means choosing a pretty theme for a bad user interface.
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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
Re:What's wrong with X?! (Score:4, Interesting)
If someone (Apple or anyone else) could come up with a window manager that followed the shared-menubar style UI of the Mac, it would be a big step in the right direction. X apps simply don't "fit" in a Mac environment. The feel is completely wrong, due to wrong UI element placement and appearance. Mac users (rightly) see X11 apps as a last resort. It's like running GNOME apps in a KDE session, or vice versa, but even worse. Different, not-entirely-compatible mechanisms of doing the same things are at work, and it's not seamless.
If there is a wm that supports Mac-style menubars, I'd love to know about it. Anyone?
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Most users want their programs to look like they were written for their OS, and they don't want to feel that it was dumped on their OS by accident. X-Windows
Re:What's wrong with X?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yeah, because no one appreciates what the Adium [adiumx.com] guys have done with libgaim. It doesn't have a legion of users swearing by the application as the best IM client, anywhere, ever.
Mac users appreciate native apps very, very much. Why do you think no one is worried about cannibalized Mac development now that you can run Windows natively on Macs? Because if one software vendor says, "Screw you Mac users, just use our app within Parallels", then the competition has low-hanging fruit which can be picked. If a competitor releases a native Mac application, even if it's not as featured as the Windows one, Mac users will buy it. Know why? Because it runs natively and doesn't force them into haphazard workarounds and hacks to get their work done.
The issue here is that open source programmers may be good programmers, but they generally aren't UI designers. And if they are, they aren't Mac UI designers. So even if they write a native Mac app, it will be implemented with UI conventions from another platform. They'll overuse tabs, make every dialog modal, put the Preferences menu option in the wrong place, etc ... You often see this stuff in Qt apps on OS X. Hell, you see it in Carbon ports of old Mac applications which ran on OS 9. But the worst offenders are Java apps. Jesus god, they look and feel like ass on OS X. I hate that Azureus is the most featured BT client out there because it sucks when it's not running on Linux or Windows, where looking robotic and using tabs for everything is apparently acceptable.
The standard (Score:3, Interesting)
Think about this for a second. Do you think the people who are interested in "the standard" rather than what they think is best would be using OSX at all? X is designed to work well for people who like Unix apps (Darwin users). Its also designed to offer some level of support for an integrated environment. But that's far short of a mac app.
Re:QUICK!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
It just takes 3 people to mod someone up to 5... If you think about it, that's why there are so many lame 5 point posts.
Re:QUICK!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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-stormin
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OpenOffice anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
DOJ should've split M$ apart after conviction ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DOJ should've split M$ apart after conviction . (Score:5, Insightful)
But yeah, VBA is something the world should be able to live without.
Virus anyone (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Meanwhile... (Score:5, Insightful)
And in other news, Open Office is getting that same feature, for which contribution Novell is being roundly denounced for conspiring with Microsoft to bring about the end of open-source software.
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Tell me when it's in Debian. (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Office is getting that same feature, for which contribution Novell is being roundly denounced for conspiring with Microsoft to bring about the end of open-source software.
If the "feature" is free, no one will denounce them for it. When I see it in the Debian repositories, I'll know it's free and commend them for the contribution. Apple users will thank them too. If they had to sign NDA's and can't distribute it, then it's just another M$ owned prop for a non-free annoyance that should be left to die. If they are using such non free props to promote their distribution, they have indeed sold the free software community out.
So half-assed Exchange support wasn't enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have clients who still run Classic exclusively so they can use Outlook 2001. The Exchange support in Entourage has been so shameful for so long (they've taken YEARS and still haven't achieved feature parity with Outlook 2001) that I really have a hard time believing it's not a deliberate move to thwart Mac use in the enterprise.
The same goes for this move. Microsoft makes a TON of money selling Mac Office, and with the Mac market growing and Microsoft standing to see a Mac Office sales increase as a result, it's not like they can't afford the development costs.
These actions only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. There's no other logical explanation.
~Philly
Re:So half-assed Exchange support wasn't enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
Exchange is a great mail program, unless you want to use it to talk to a non-Exchange server. As a non-Exchange server, it sucks.
Really, it wasn't made with interoperability in mind. It was designed to woo over the Novell Groupware crowd, and then lock the users in to one system. Unfortunately, it's succeeded far to well, something even Microsoft admits. They've been trying to open it up just a bit more, but as soon as one arm of the company manages to get it to work with an open product (like WebDAV or mbox spools), another arm of the company implements another incompatible and ill-documented lockdown feature (like Sharepoint integration).
It's a shame that Novell decided to quench the pipe for the open-source Hula, which could have filled a pretty big part of the whole left by yanking out Exchange. But I guess that when you choose new sleeping partners, you also have to change the bedding accordingly.
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Why? I've heard people say this before, and yet I use Entourage every single day, connected to our corporate Exchange server. We have a mostly Windows shop, with a few of us on Macs.
My email is seamless, my contacts are seamless (LDAP I believe), my calender is perfect. I've never even seen a hint of an issue.
So what features and issues do people have with Entourage? Is it just stuf
DUPE (Score:2)
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/08
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Does anyone follow this kind of thing ?
Re:Must be a slow news day at Slashdot... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd wager C++ or C#. Or, more likely, just any "dot-net" language. It's currently a pain to write C# code to automate Office, but if Office became "native
A blessing or a curse? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Very old news, but typical Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, Windows is the new Classic.
After a week, you'll figure out a way not to need it.
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Not a big deal at all... (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly, if they left VBA in we'd be questioning M$ for persisting to include a platform that has been notoriously insecure.
Considering that Office 2007 is including InfoPath and Groove as alternatives to distributing forms one has to believe that M$ first move away from VBA is not their last. Frankly having done many Office automation projects over the years I can say that VBA is quite a programming limitation, difficult to scale and prone to memory leaks.
As for alternatives, I have yet to find a management-type who wouldn't leap at the offer of replacing a stodgy, circa-1995 automated Word document with some sort of web-based application instead. For that matter, you can be outside of the M$ camp entirely by rolling out the replacements in PHP, JSP, Struts or FlashMX.
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
iWork '07 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:iWork '07 (Score:5, Informative)
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]
Converter? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Huge confidence from microsoft (Score:2)
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.
I see two products making money in my Xtal ball (Score:4, Funny)
One is to translate VBA in Office to Applescript and the second one is to translate Applescript to VBA.
Damn, I don't know either of them and I am so busy reading /. that I don't have time to learn, otherwise, I am going to be rich.
A great argument to go web based (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem solved. Long live the Intranet.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Who uses VBA anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, no! Word Macro viruses won't run! (Score:5, Funny)
The only time I use VBA automation is when a PC user sends me a Word attachment with a macro virus and I open it.
We must have cross-platform virus compatibility! If we don't have Word macro viruses, what will be left for antivirus programs to protect Mac users from? The Mac antivirus market will collapse!
Who uses it? (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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Third party support? (Score:3, Interesting)
According to one MacBU developer's blog, the Mac version of OS X will have support for basically the same object model used in Office for Windows, but will only lack support for the VBA language itself. In its place, developers can use AppleScript or other languages to script Mac Office.
So what are the chances that someone like Real Software will step in with a Mac Office plugin to allow it to handle VBA scripts?
Re:Visual Basic is pass .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Visual Basic is pass .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical Microsoft Tactics at work (Score:2)
Personally, I could care less. Office
Re:Typical Microsoft Tactics at work (Score:5, Funny)
No, you couldn't.
Re:Typical Microsoft Tactics at work (Score:5, Insightful)
and the old stuff runs fine under Rosetta.
Powerpoint barely runs at all under Rosetta.
Excel takes six or seven bounces to launch. Not acceptable on up-to-the-minute hardware.
Word eats 7%-10% cpu sitting idle. Doesn't help the battery life when you're writing on the road.
NeoOffice, while a great tool to have around, is so poorly optimized that it's barely faster native than MS Office is under Rosetta (sometimes slower).
Back to the topic... this move by MS is part of a continued effort to prevent Macs from making any inroads into the corporate space, which is MS's most lucrative market. After the next release of Mac Office, the consumers/educational types/etc. will be thrilled -- it will probably look gorgeous, run fast, etc. But business users, most of whom have brain-dead VBA cruft to deal with, will have no choice but to run Windows Office somehow... which involves a license of Windows, at least until CodeWeavers is able to make Office versions newer than 2000 run under Crossover Mac.
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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.
DirectX (Score:2)
Cedega is (somewhat) popular, not because DirectX is superior to Linux alternatives, but because many computer games depend on it.
Linux has an "alternative" to DirectX? DirectX generally kicks the pants off of OpenGL performance-wise, and graphics accelerators aren't built with anything else in mind.
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I r smrt.
Re:bah! (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know what's worse: being the one making a 70MB+ powerpoint presentation or the one forced to sit through it!
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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.
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Re:bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a big problem for the few long document writers who use Macs. Long Word documents on the Mac take forever to open - tables render slowly, repagination consumes 180% of my CPU, and making changes at the end of a complex 400-page document is an exercise in frustration on a 4.5GB RAM/Dual 2.5GHz G5 - twenty seconds from "Save" to response.
Once, Framemaker on Macs and Solaris machines were what Technical Writers used - period. Over the years, the lowest-common-denominator mentality of corporate purchasing has taken over - and Adobe has handed Microsoft a huge gift by killing the Mac version of FrameMaker, forcing Mac writers to use Word.
The end result has been that most new companies - those without established Tech Pubs departments - use Word for everything. It's been my experience that the younger the Tech Pubs manager is, the less inclined they are to use FrameMaker - because it's "teh hard". Unfortunately for tech writers and their audiences, Frame still is the most complete and usable tool for long documents - but it's on the way out.
Now, documents from HR manuals to API references to microprocessor manuals are written in Word, which has barfed up anything over about forty ages for over a decade now. Seriously - Microsoft has never fixed the corrupted save and document recovery bugs that 95% of users never experience - because you'll only see the problem when you create long, complex documents.
When working on a recent assignment for a Group that shall remain nameless, I spent most of my time trying to work around Word's limitations. I asked the SME about the source material - did he have problems like mine when using Word on his company-issued top-flight PC? "Yes." Would they consider using Framemaker for their next document? "I don't have time to learn a new program" said the scientist.
Keep in mind, I spent ten of sixty billable hours just trying to get Word to process words. Ostensibly, this is what it's designed to do, but this decade-plus-old program still cannot handle long documents with lots of graphics. Microsoft was busy doing other things, like churning out ten versions of DirectX and the Zune - other products that extend and extinguish.
I'm not asking for a lot. We're talking about a 400-page document with lots of tables, few graphics, and fewer than twenty styles. This would be among the medium-sized documents that FrameMaker could open in 1-2 seconds. In Word, on a Dual G5, it takes over four minutes to completely open the document, because Word insists on repaginating every time you look askance. then, after about ten-fifteen Saves, Word barfs. Sometimes, the only way you can get the document back is to open the
This isn't a document-specific or release-specific problem. I've wasted time on this with several recent versions of Word - on the Mac and PC - and with several similar documents. The problem will likely never be fixed. And because of Adobe's shortsightedness and Microsoft's LCD mentality, the only real alternative is LaTex - a very complex solution to what should be an easy problem. Frame was the ideal, but Adobe dutifully did the most stupid thing possible and killed it on the Mac. I wouldn't mind using Frame on the PC, but as I said above, most of the assignments I take on as a contract technical writer come to me in Word.
Tying this into the VBA-less Mac version of Office, it's clear that Microsoft IS trying to force the professionals who insist on using Macs off the platform. Just as they've convinced the memo-writers in corporate IT that Word on any platform is perfectly suitable for the Tech Pubs department, they slowly reduce the options available to users, costing companies time and money that goes unnoticed and untabulated in the TCO equation.
Office for Mac development costs them next to nothing,
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-Z
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Re:Let's Be Honest (Score:4, Interesting)
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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 i
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Re:Not surprisingly... (Score:4, Insightful)
What iWork needs is a spreadsheet application, and possibly a database program.
The MacWorld Expo is coming soon.
Re:Not surprisingly... (Score:4, Insightful)
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=IF(AND($A$5"",VLOOKUP(YEAR($A$5)&TEXT(MONTH($A$5)
In pseudo-Java style, that looks something like this:
Cell a5 = new Cell("A", "5");
Cell b10 = new Cell("B", "10");
CellData lookup;
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
=IF(AND($A$5"",VLOOKUP(YEAR($A$5)&TEXT(MONTH($A$5) ,"00")&TEXT(DAY($A$5),"00")&$B10&"2",SomeOtherShee tName,2,0)0),VLOOKUP(YEAR($A$5)&TEXT(MONTH($A$5)," 00")&TEXT(DAY($A$5),"00")&$B10&"2",SomeOtherSheetN ame,2,0),"")
Call that a formula? It may be long, but it's still fairly simple. When you want to check what value someone was given in another experiment, and (for convenience) give the explanation, it gets a bit more complicated (but still simple enough to do as a formula)
=VLOOKUP(VLOOKUP(A3,OtherSheetName!A:D,4,FALSE),Ot herSheetDecode!A:B,2,FALSE)
(put in some IF( ) parts to hide the #N/A entries, and it gets long, but still not complicated)
On the other hand, if you want to pull dates from a whole string of