No VBA in Office

[Charles Dyer]

On 22 Nov, 2006, at 04:12, David Cake wrote:

> 	So, Visual Basic for Applications was cut from the next version of  
> Office way back in August, and it was hardly even mentioned here  
> (only in passing a couple of times)
> 	So, I gather people here don't actually care much?
> 	Anyway, just was pointed to an interesting technical discussion  
> here about why
> http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic
> 	The summary, for the non-programmers amongst us, being that the  
> MacBU dropped it because it was Too Hard, and from that they  
> describe, it certainly sounds as if it would have been not  
> impossible, but really very difficult. Rather, its fairly  
> astonishing that VBA worked usably in the first place, and if thats  
> typical of Microsoft application design, its a no wonder that  
> things like processor changes seem much bigger obstacles for them  
> than for most app vendors (Adobe excepted).

For me and those I support, there was one reason, and one reason  
only, to stick with MS Office: compatibility with Office in Windows,  
including macros. No VBA for Mac means that MS Office for Mac  
competes with Pages/Keynote and OpenOffice solely on the grounds of  
file compatibility. Pages can do 99.99% of what Word can do; some  
things are easier to to in Word (paragraph borders...) and some  
things are easier to do in Pages (actually getting work done...) but  
once you leave out VBA, Pages does Word docs quick & easy and is a  
lot cheaper. OpenOffice is clunky (or at least was the last time I  
looked at it) but also does Word/Excel docs quick & easy. NeoOffice  
isn't quite as clunky as OpenOffice, but is slow. I'm sure that fast  
hardware will fix that. OpenOffice/NeoOffice are _free_. So, no, if  
there's no VBA, exactly why are we buying Office for Mac again? When  
Apple ships a spreadsheet with iWork, Office Mac will be effectively  
zombiefied.

Someone wake me up if/when VBA is restored. Let me know if Access was  
added while they were about it.