No VBA in Office

[Charles Dyer]

On 22 Nov, 2006, at 12:55, Michael Brian Bentley wrote:

> 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?

I don't know about O'Reilly specifically, but I've used Word  
templates in Pages and had them work. Some templates took a bit of  
effort to make work, but so far I've not had a problem. (Except where  
there are paragraph styles which contain borders or shading. Pages  
simply ignores that kind of thing when importing files from Word. You  
can set it up, later, but it's a pain to do. OpenOffice doesn't seem  
to have this problem.)

> 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?

I've never done that, even in Word. I've always broken documents into  
sections and formatted the sections as necessary. Pages does that as  
well, or better, than Word.

>
> 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.

Which version of Word do you use? I've got Office 2004. It's  
reliable.I still use Word and Excel where I need to use macros. (Or  
paragraph styles with borders or shading.)