No VBA in Office

[Michael Brian Bentley]

Charles Dyer writes:

>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.

Does Pages support the style templates you can get from, say, 
O'Reilly? How is Pages at supporting some sort of master document 
thing, where chapters are assigned separate files and you can do 
global summary operations like TOC, indexing,  and outlining?

My old copy of Word is freaky. I'm working on a large book-size 
document, and I rather like the idea of using something other than 
Word, but haven't seen a clear winning alternative. Pages has not 
been calling to me, I've been contemplating obtaining a more current 
copy of Word.