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.
Four years? (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Re:Four years? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Four years? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Sales Of Office For Mac Highest In Nearly 20 Years [google.com]
The above, I think, is a story in itself.
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Re:Four years? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow (Score:1)
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I'm not convinced that
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
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)
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)
Whether that's true or not I don't know, it's the old choice between assuming incompetence or malice I guess.
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You must be new here.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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,
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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.
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Ask Spolsky [joelonsoftware.com], he invented the thing :)
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My guess is that they're cooking something which VBA to be hosted on the
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But crazy conspiracy theories sound more interesting.
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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
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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)
That is _so_ cool (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That is _so_ cool (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That is _so_ cool (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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.
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Re:That is _so_ cool (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That is _so_ cool (Score:4, Interesting)
*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...
Those who use VBA deserve Office and Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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Anything to do with OpenOffice? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Is there any real VBA compatability in OO? (Score:3, Interesting)
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A simple enough reason. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A simple enough reason. (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless you have some special need for Microsoft Office that Neo Office doesn't meet, I don't see any reason to pay for Microsoft Office other than just not knowing any better.
Good sign? (Score:2)
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.
Features? (Score:2)
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).
Why change? I'll wait for Office 2010. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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And I never lost VBA support--so I can still support clients who are using office macros I wrote 15 years ago!
Cheers,
Sean
Re:Why change? I'll wait for Office 2010. (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
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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
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(IMO the UI in Word 6 was the least of its problems and probably could have been fixed without losing the cross-platformness.)
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The thing is, my desktop is a 466 MHz PPC G4 and my laptop is a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo.
do it right or not at all (Score:2)
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)
Visual Basic will be returning to Mac Office.
What did Mac users do to deserve that punishment?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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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
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The next Mac/PC ad (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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.
features? (Score:2)
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
Customer Request and Lack of movement (Score:1)
Gee, thanks, Mac BU. (Score:3, Interesting)
'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.
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Office 98 for Macintosh (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Stability (Score:2)
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
consistency (Score:1)
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?
Personal Story (Score:1)
Microsoft is going to be screwed over the next few (Score:3, Interesting)
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."
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:Feedback (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Feedback (Score:4, Funny)
*silently weeps, humming the theme of 'Friends', while balled up and slowly rocking back and fourth under his desk*
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This was probably a bigger deal 15 years ago, but it was always an advantage that MS had over their competitors.