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.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Those who use VBA deserve Office and Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Feedback (Score:5, Insightful)
The number of fricking POS Access applications I had to support that were coded so badly that it took days to figure out what the person was trying to do is insane. Corporate america is riddled with these kind of monsters causing IT people to ball up under their desks and cry through the night.
I was happy when they removed VBA because it stopped that nightmare.
Re:Four years? (Score:5, Insightful)
A simple enough reason. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That is _so_ cool (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Four years? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Four years? (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't need no steenking MS office (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't so long ago I pretty much had to use MS software on my Mac to do all I needed to do -- WMP, Office, IE. Today, the only MS code on my Mac is codecs for wmv and wma files (which I play in mplayer). This is real progress, and we owe a big debt of gratitude it to the FOSS guys.
Re:Those who use VBA deserve Office and Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That is _so_ cool (Score:4, Insightful)
Forced Update (Score:3, Insightful)
And if MS listed to this demand, why are they so deaf to keeping XP available through at least the next Windows upgrade?
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