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Microsoft Businesses Software Apple

VBA Will Return To Mac Office 113

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.
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VBA Will Return To Mac Office

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  • Four years? (Score:5, Funny)

    by IBBoard ( 1128019 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @07:16AM (#23401124) Homepage
    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? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @07:38AM (#23401300)
      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? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by random0xff ( 1062770 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @08:22AM (#23401736)
        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: (Score:2, Insightful)

        Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Imsdal ( 930595 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @08:01AM (#23401502)
      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.

      • I am sorry I don't see Linux Dwarfing Windows. Linux is an excelent Server OS but it really is sub-par for desktop use, even the mighty Ubentu holds on to the old way of doing things and doesn't offer any real competitive advantage over Mac and Windows to really get a majoirity to switch unless they need a new version and scrap for cash. I am talking about the average computer user. They really don't care what OS they run, if they have 98% uptime vs. 99.9999% doesn't bother them. All they want to do is pl
    • Apparently, the 4-year wait isn't a problem.

      Sales Of Office For Mac Highest In Nearly 20 Years [google.com]

      The above, I think, is a story in itself.
  • Adding features that have been dropped in Windows in favour of newer and better ones? That's nice. I suppose it saves them porting .Net over to the mac.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jellybob ( 597204 )
      That's ok, they don't actually have to port it anyway - the Mono project has already done that for them.

      I'm not convinced that .Net is the right tool for most users anyway

      If you've got an inhouse development team, or money to contract some development out, then using a real development environment makes a lot of sense, and the .Net interface allows some pretty powerful features to be added to Office.

      Your average Excel user doesn't want to sit down and learn a new language though, they just want their spread
    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jackharrer ( 972403 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @07:24AM (#23401190)
      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 (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Zelos ( 1050172 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @07:35AM (#23401260)
        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: (Score:3, Funny)

          by ArhcAngel ( 247594 )
          Why they didn't write one portable VBA engine for Windows and Mac I don't know.

          You must be new here.
        • Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)

          by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @08:36AM (#23401928) Homepage Journal

          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.

          • by mrjah ( 574093 )
            Minor nitpick: I knew of very, very few office or home desktops with 16-24 MB of RAM at that time. 4MB was standard for home machines, with 8MB considered a luxury. From what I saw, the standard in the workplace was similar.
          • The Windows API has already been ported to *nix environments in the form of Mainwin [mainsoft.com]. It isn't a big stretch to adapt it to OSX.
            • by bjb ( 3050 ) *
              As well, I'd be tempted to suggest that maybe Microsoft even did this on their own. See the binaries for the Solaris version of Internet Explorer 5. Looks like there is some ported Windows API there.
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Gazzonyx ( 982402 )
          I think the VBA engine is somewhat tightly tied to the win32 API and system DLLs. Most likely having a single engine would have been a complete mess as its a "middle layer" component, and has to interface the system and office beneath it and the window manager above it.

          Sometimes it's easier to just branch the code base than try to maintain too many interfaces and libraries with their own edge cases and corner cases. What would they do if two obscure bugs intersected such that the semantics of fixing on
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by nine-times ( 778537 )

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

          From what little I know, it seems like the team that develops Office for Windows and the team that develops Office for Mac are entirely separate, and don't work together. So the Mac team looks at the Windows version and ports over what features they can, but the Windows people don't do anything to make that process easy. So as a result, you don't get real Exchange support in Entourage, and you don't get VB support.

          It's also worth noting that the Mac team is either under-resourced or mentally retarded,

          • by SlamMan ( 221834 )
            to be fair, they did release an update within a couple days that got rid of the expiration date.
            • I spent a week checking for an update before looking to their blog, in which I found a posting suggesting that users live with the problem until the final version was released.

              it was at that point that I gave up and started using CoRD [sourceforge.net] instead. It's far from perfect, but I haven't seen any evidence that the developers have contempt for their users' needs.

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

          Ask Spolsky [joelonsoftware.com], he invented the thing :)

        • Why they didn't write one portable VBA engine for Windows and Mac I don't know.
          It sounds like it was portable at one time, long ago, back in the days of 8MB 030 Macs. It used some sort of pcode compiler and apparently they couldn't port that to modern systems. Win64 apparently has the same issue.

          My guess is that they're cooking something which VBA to be hosted on the .NET runtime, and this will be used for both Win and Mac products.

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The previous support was written for PowerPC and they could not easily port the VBA from Windows (written in MASM) to the new Macs.

        But crazy conspiracy theories sound more interesting.
      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        As mentioned in the original blog, and in the comments of this blog, the VBA support was cut because the VBA engine in Office 2004 was very specifically designed to operate on the PowerPC architecture. The engine would have to be rewritten to run on Intel on a Macintosh and that was not something that could be accomplished in their schedule. So they would have to either delay Office 2008, make it PowerPC only and run under Rosetta or cut VBA from this release and review it again at a later date. MS chose
      • by wootest ( 694923 )
        They didn't drop it out of spite as such. A lot of the existing VBA code was hand-rolled PowerPC ASM *and* based on a since-surpassed VBA version, in combination with an understaffed department for this sort of support. "Running to stand still" wouldn't really cover it, although I'm starting to wonder what has changed since; maybe it's just become more tenable to port the Windows version, or maybe people have been hired.
      • by tacocat ( 527354 )

        I'm more concerned that they are going to continue it at all. It's pretty significant that they are going to continue Office on the Mac. It's REALLY significant that they are doing this after pronouncing Mac Office dead.

        I think what this means is that they are more open to the idea that they are losing the desktop and probably won't be able to do much about it. But they are really worried that the same might happen with Office.

        If a small number of significant companies start using non-Microsoft applica

      • by Allador ( 537449 )
        I'm not sure how your post got marked 5 insightful.

        There is no confusion about why they dropped it in the first place.

        Right there one of the paragraphs in TFA talks about it, and has a link to a prior blog posts that states exactly why they dropped it.
  • NeoOffice... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @07:17AM (#23401132)
    ...already has support [neooffice.org] for it.
  • by cerberusss ( 660701 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @07:21AM (#23401166) Journal
    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.
    • by jez9999 ( 618189 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @07:33AM (#23401248) Homepage Journal
      You forgot to mention how lightning-fast VBA is, and the fact that its intuative design encourages good coding practices.
    • by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @08:16AM (#23401668)
      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: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Zelos ( 1050172 )
        Sure, VBA is pretty nice for that kind of thing (much quicker than learning Perl/Python or something), the problem comes when people try to use VBA for something it's not intended for. The fact that Option Explicit isn't on by default leads to some pretty nasty code, in my experience.

        My first programming job was writing a 15,000 line inventory management system in VBA, it was a horrendous mixture of VBA and VB ActiveX that stopped working as soon as they upgraded to Office 2000.
      • I totally agree with you, actually. I was just horsing around. The electronics guy here too whips up quickies in VBA. Sure, it's "write-only" but it definitely beats Matlab.
      • by Gazzonyx ( 982402 ) <scott.lovenbergNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @08:54AM (#23402214)
        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.
    • Re:That is _so_ cool (Score:4, Interesting)

      by vertinox ( 846076 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @08:58AM (#23402256)
      That is just _so_ cool. I'm absolutely dying to help my customers by creating cross-platform applications in VBA.

      *coughs* I've heard someone tell me once to never buy stock in a company that uses shared Excel files and VBA for their main accounting due to the fact it tends to often grow gross inaccuracies over time due to sloppy user work and lack of auditing actually cooks their books without anyone really knowing about it.

      Of course he was the person maintaining the VBA code so he might have been biased...
  • by jkrise ( 535370 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @07:24AM (#23401192) Journal
    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.
    • > keeps them on the upgrade treadmill forever.

      No it does not. Last time I looked previous versions of office still worked as good as they did back then.

      You can argue the same for using any software, but it really does not force people into an upgrade cycle.

      I think it's more a human obsession that people feel inadequate without the latest version of something. I often talk to people about updating software and they cannot give any good reason for doing it or any benefits they think it will bring. When th
      • by b1t r0t ( 216468 )

        No it does not. Last time I looked previous versions of office still worked as good as they did back then.

        ...until you can't buy a new copy of it any more. What are you going to do when your precious VBA scripts which are company-wide and need to be on every user's computer don't run on the new version, and you can't buy more of the old version? Your choices are 1) throw them away or 2) software piracy (even if you buy the new version that doesn't legally entitle you to the old version, which means you're vulnerable to BSA blackmail)

        (Why would someone deploy their scripts that way? Because it's more enterpri

        • Why not use the software you install it on in the first place. with my MSDN subscription I can get office versions back to Office 95. That's 12 years old and 6 OS's ago. If your app is that older than that you have had time to upgrade, and when you do upgrade you normally target the current platform meaning your safe for another 12+ years.
          • Read your license. Those MSDN versions are for testing and development, not for installing on the new receptionist's machine because she needs to use some ancient Access 95 VBA monstrosity to update the employee phone/email directory.
            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              I think You should read it again. The license states that the OS, and office productivity components can be used for actual office work, not just development. Same with the development tools and SDK. About the only bits in MSDN that can't be used for normal work are the Server pieces, like Exchange, and SQL servers.
              • However a MSDN seat license (at $5000 or whatever) is certainly not a cost-effective way to buy MS Office. I believe tho that you can downgrade Access 2007 to 95 with the corp license, so its useful to have the media.
      • Last time I looked previous versions of office still worked as good as they did back then.

        Indeed they do, and most of the world would be quite happy running Office 97.

        They won't sell it to you, though. For new computers, you can just use your old copy until you can't buy XP anymore (I don't think it plays nice with Vista). But if you need a new license for a new hire, you have to buy at least Office 2003.

        To be fair to Microsoft here, I'm not aware of any major Open Source applications that are kept up-to-date but stable feature-wise from 1997. :)

        • pine/alpine?
          • I thought you had me there, but then I saw this change [washington.edu], which may have required users to update their rules! Heavens! :)
            • That seems "stable feature-wise" to me. It upgrades your settings, tries to prevent destruction due to _new_ features, but the new changes obviously aren't backwards compatible when you run the old version again.

              It still seems to me to fit that idea. The prefs file format is generally the same, and even with this change, you could still continue to use the older versions with the same pref file, you would still get the same behavior from the old version even after you ran the new version.

              Not all, but some
              • I was just joking, actually. I agree that is not a significant change... it only affects people who's scripts were broken anyway. They could have done it the MS way and kept it bug-compatible, but they did the right thing and fixed the behavior... though it has a nasty side effect of potential data loss...
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by New Breeze ( 31019 )
      Insightful? Most of the stuff built with these things are small utility applications for specific departmental uses. The beancounters know what they're doing, i.e. a book on Excel and VBA for Joey down in the warehouse so he can automate his inventory sheets to print in location order so his job is easier vs. a department of expensive CS majors bitching about doing "crap work" like this doesn't take much to see where the value to the stockholders is. The right tool for the right job, not everything needs
  • by ais523 ( 1172701 ) <ais523(524\)(525)x)@bham.ac.uk> on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @07:38AM (#23401294)
    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.)
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      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.
    • Out of curiousity, have you (or has anyone) actually seen *any* version of OpenOffice that will open and run spreadsheets with VBA? I keep hearing vague claims about VBA compatibility (what the heck is "partial VBA support"??), but every version of OO I've tried (including 3.0 beta for Windows) chokes on my VBA spreadsheets. I was able to port these spreadsheets to Starbasic leaving 90% of the code unchanged (and with a *lot* of help from the forums at Openoffice.org). But I have yet to see any reasonable o
    • by ibmjones ( 52133 )
      Hooray for competition.
  • by MMC Monster ( 602931 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @07:39AM (#23401302)
    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).
  • The blog post calls for feedback on what features of VBA and Windows interoperability are most important to people.

    One of the things I dislike about MS products is bloat. Features I don't need only serve to get in my way and waste memory and drive space. Getting rid of unneeded bloat is a good thing.

    OTOH another thing I dislike about MS is its seeming inability to work and play well with others. If they're going to remove interoperability thay've already accomplished (by accident?), that's not a good thing.
  • The blog post calls for feedback on what features of VBA and Windows interoperability are most important to people.

    I should think all of them, since interoperability with Office for Windows is the only reason there is for spending a lot of money on Office for Mac instead of spending a lot less money on either a cheaper commercial alternative (Pages, Mariner Write, etc) or using an open source alternative (FINALLY Open Office is getting around to an Aqua version).

  • by lancejjj ( 924211 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @08:10AM (#23401598) Homepage
    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.
    • Ha! I'm still using Office X from 2001 when I got my first iBook. Sure I was a little worried it might not work on Leopard on the intel-based MacBook (like certain Adobe products I could name), but she's screaming along just fine.

      And I never lost VBA support--so I can still support clients who are using office macros I wrote 15 years ago!

      Cheers,

      Sean
    • by e4g4 ( 533831 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @09:47AM (#23403058)

      I find that Office 2004 is quite a bit faster than Office 2008
      Seconded! I'm still completely baffled by the fact that Word 2008 takes almost a full minute to load on my brand new MacBook - while Word 2004 (running in rosetta) clocks in at about 15 seconds.
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        In Word go to Word > Preferences
        Click on "General"
        uncheck "WYSIWYG font and style menus"
        uncheck "Show Project Gallery At Startup"
        Restart Word

        Office 2008 starts in ~4 seconds on my MacBook. I could care less about VBA, although I suppose if someone ever sent me something with VBA in it I could get NeoOffice. I got a cheap academic license through my university.
    • 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.

      MS probably has a short memory from the Word 6.0 fiasco. Word 5.0 was great on a Mac. Word 6.0 was horrible. It was slow and buggy. The reason had to do with the development of Word 6.0.

      Originally, MS decided to build Word 6.0 for Windows and Mac from a new but common code base. That way the feature set would be comparable and cod

      • Yes, this is basically it. Mac users whined mightily about getting a Windows port, so MS forked their codebase and now the Mac is always behind feature parity with the Windows version.

        (IMO the UI in Word 6 was the least of its problems and probably could have been fixed without losing the cross-platformness.)
    • I use Office 2004 on my desktop and Office 2008 on my laptop, and they seem to run at comparable speeds to me.

      The thing is, my desktop is a 466 MHz PPC G4 and my laptop is a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo.
  • What interoperability features I want? All of them. Except for the interoperability features that are really bugs.

    Seriously, the only point of Office on Mac is to be able not to buy a windows license. If Microsoft isn't willing to do a feature complete replacement, maybe they should just rethink it and not sell Office for Mac if they can't swing it. They don't want to, because unless they port the bugs too, that makes office for mac better than office for windows, for certain values of "office for mac sp
  • Ouch (Score:5, Funny)

    by HangingChad ( 677530 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @08:18AM (#23401702) Homepage

    Visual Basic will be returning to Mac Office.

    What did Mac users do to deserve that punishment?

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @08:27AM (#23401804)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • On one hand their products are hindered by backwards compatibility required by the business community, yet on another hand, their products are becoming irrelevant thanks to web platforms like Google apps, and virtualization tools like Parallels and VMware.
      I rather think that virtualization tools like Paralles and VMware work to increase the importance of Windows products by making it easier to use native Windows products on the Mac rather than native Mac ones.
    • Microsoft is fighting a battle against becoming irrelevant.

      A battle Mircrosoft seems to be winning:

      Microsoft said sales of Office 2008, which launched in January, are nearly three times what the company saw with the launch of Office 2004. The suite is selling faster than any version in 19 years. Sales Of Office For Mac Highest In Nearly 20 Years [informationweek.com] [May 13]

      Nowhere is the gap between philosophical acceptance and actual adoption clearer than on the desktop where -- despite critical praise of recent Linux dis

  • by Dystopian Rebel ( 714995 ) * on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @08:35AM (#23401916) Journal
    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!
  • by clang_jangle ( 975789 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @08:44AM (#23402070) Journal
    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.
  • what features of VBA and Windows interoperability are most important to people.

    Let me see.... all of them?

    When I was writing VBA for Excel spreadsheets, I had this really great book on it (VBA for Excel), but many of the examples simply didn't work. This was mostly because of differences between VBA versions (I believe the windows version was 6 at the time, but the mac version was 4, but I could be way off... this is 4 years ago, I'm talking about).

    This caused me to have extreme issues not only learning the
  • The reason for this coming back is that customers asked for it. Many customers have old VB code in documents that they either cannot or will not convert. This gives them a way to regain some functionality.
  • Gee, thanks, Mac BU. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by caution live frogs ( 1196367 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @09:19AM (#23402568)
    Since switching to using a Mac at work last summer, I've been pretty happy, except for the god-awful problems with Mac Office. It's my one remaining annoyance on OS X. Office 2004 was so slow on my Mac (a 2.4 ghz core duo MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of RAM) that opening any Word doc longer than four or five pages caused massive hiccups. Trying to open things that contained images or (god forbid) had "Track changes" enabled - well, forget it. When Office '08 was released I was happy - until I installed it.

    '04 might be slow, but '08 randomly causes hard system freezes (mouse responsive, but nothing else works - forces me to reboot). No real pattern to it, either. Has never happened unless an Office program is open. Missing VBA is not so bad for Word unless you count the subsequent loss of all plug-ins, including EndNote - which as a scientist I really can't live without. Not to mention the problems with Excel, which is where I assume 90% of the VBA complains have come from. So many Excel spreadsheets rely on macros to work properly. And the user interface? The changes in Office 08 might seem like improvements for anyone that has never used Office on Windows, but going from 07 at home to 08 at work makes me want to tear my hair out. The floating "toolbox" palette is horrible and unusable, but the floating, undockable Formula bar in Excel - how did that actually make it past quality control?

    The most damning thing about this all is that they are charging MORE for Mac Office than they are for Office 07 - more money for fewer programs (no OneNote, for example, no Access, no real Outlook compatibility - Entourage is not Outlook, thank god I don't have to use either, but many people need it). More money for what are essentially broken components (half the known issues with Office 08 are compatibility problems with 07, plus the loss of VBA that has caused so many problems). And now they are telling us that our problems will be solved, so long as we will just wait a few years and then hand them even more money?

    There are reasons I have NeoOffice installed, and 90% of those reasons are the idiotic decisions made by the Mac BU. As much as I like open source, I would be perfectly happy using Microsoft Office if they would deliver on the Mac the same functionality they offer on Windows - but if Microsoft won't deliver, my money is going elsewhere. I have a hard time thinking I'd be the only one making the same decision.
  • by Ohio Calvinist ( 895750 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @10:05AM (#23403350)
    I have to agree with a lot of the other posters in that Microsoft's only advantage was (is?) 100% compatibility with PC Office, which since Office 98 has slowly been chipped away. Office 98 was not only highly (if not 100%) compatible with Office for PC, but it was almost identical at the UI level. This was really nice for students in Mac schools because they could get the MS Office training to get a job someday rather than take Computer Applications 101 on Claris Works, because there are so many people that learn by contrete example (writing down steps) rather than computing concepts and general usage.

    However, in later versions, Office for Mac has become more uncompatible (Mac only stuff that doesn't port to PC, PC only stuff that doesn't port to Mac), that there really is no reason to pay the hefty MS pricetag over Open Office.org. Even the "the UI is the same so our 'special' users can figure it out on a different platform" argument is gone.

    As much as I hate to say it, Macro compatibility was their *last* stride above the competition (aside from brand recognition) and without that MS Office Mac is really just one of many implementations that gives the "kind of works" compatibility competiting (free or commercial) products already give.
  • So MS is asking what features people would like in a platform on which to build office solutions. I'd say that the primary thing they need to implement is stability in the platform.

    You're a complete sucker if you decide to build something on top of Office For Mac. Fool-me-once and all that. Any IT decision maker that places their bets (and invests) in this technology simply doesn't understand business.

    MS has done exactly what they intended: disable people's confidence in the Mac (or at least, in Offi

  • What do I want in Office? How about consistency in the layout of a document, for starters? Every version (Mac or PC) seems to make slightly different approximations, resulting in differences in where page breaks or text/picture frames end up every once in a while. Used to be way worse, but it's still not perfect. How about consistency in the use of special characters between Mac and PC? If I type pi (the lowercase Greek letter, using the Symbol font) in a Mac, I expect it to read as pi on a PC. And vice ve
  • Forced Update (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @10:53AM (#23404120)
    So by putting it back in this will make the next Mac Office a Must Have update - netting Microsoft lots of $$$s. Why am I not surprised?

    And if MS listed to this demand, why are they so deaf to keeping XP available through at least the next Windows upgrade?

  • Had some problems with Filevault not deleting encrypted images upon waking from sleep... anyways I had to reinstall the OS, and had lost my Office Mac CD, so I installed NeoOffice, intending to buy a new copy if I ran into any major problems. That was about two years ago.
  • by multiplexo ( 27356 ) on Wednesday May 14, 2008 @08:08PM (#23412602) Journal

    years. I know that this has been said before and that I'm not the first person to say it but I think that Microsoft is going to be in for rough times because of Vista and because of the speed of the PC hardware that has been released over the last six years.

    Five years ago I built my parents new PCs based upon AMD CPUs and ASUS motherboards and running Windows XP. Since then I have upgraded the RAM on their systems out to the max of 1.5Gb and they still run just fine, my Dad has a few newer games that are a bit slow, but applications such as Office, IE, FireFox, Adobe, TurboCAD, etc run just fine under XP. My laptop at work is almost four years old, I've had more memory installed and a larger hard drive but again, it works just fine with Office, etc under Windows XP. Newer hardware offers more bells and whistles but unless you're doing video work, or playing games a decent system put together in 2003 or 2004 will run XP just fine. No one I know on the Windows side of the IT world is looking forward to upgrading to Vista because in order to do so we'd have to junk a bunch of perfectly good systems to install an OS that brings no benefit in a business environment. Business users don't need Aero glass, they don't need Vista's multimedia features (because businesses feel that if you want to do cool multimedia stuff you should do it at home and not be fucking off and doing it at work), they don't need Vista's "improved" security because any business that has an IT department that's worth it's salary are already behind firewalls, scan all incoming e-mails for viruses, automatically install security upgrades on user desktops and laptops and otherwise check their networks for infected systems and because the help desk guys really don't want to spend their entire day answering questions inspired by Vista's UAC spamming end users with largely spurious security notifications.

    The only reason why anyone is buying Vista is because they have to. Dell just informed us today that as of tomorrow XP is no longer available as an OEM installed OS. You can still get it from Dell, but you're actually buying Vista with a "Downgrade Rights" license that allows you to install XP but with a Vista license. The "Downgrade Rights" program will be available until December 31st, 2010, so Microsoft will be able to say that they're selling lots and lots of copies of Vista when in reality many of these copies of Vista will actually be copies of XP sold under the "Downgrade Rights" program.

    Pause and think for a moment upon how fucked up this is. Microsoft came out with a new operating system that no one wants; they tried to force adoption of the new OS by end of lifing the old one, but there was so much push back that they first had to extend the end of life date and then had to compromise and come out with the "Downgrade Rights" program which basically says that they're selling XP until New Year's Eve, 2010. Microsoft is fucked because they couldn't just keep selling XP, if they did it would be an implicit admission on their part that Vista is a failure. Microsoft also can't just say to customers "Fuck you, we're not selling XP any more, if you need an OS it's Vista or the highway" because if they did business customers in search of new systems might just say "Fuck it. I'll try the highway then. I'll keep my XP systems running as long as I can (which given the current economic climate isn't a bad idea anyways) and when I hit the wall where they don't run any more look at buying Macs or running Linux on the desktop."

"A mind is a terrible thing to have leaking out your ears." -- The League of Sadistic Telepaths

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