[griffman]

"I see your point, Rob Griffiths, but I don't agree with the premise--that leaving out a cross-platform scripting language is going to kill Office for the Mac. Some form of built in scripting functionality is great, but I always found MySQL, AppleScript, Perl, RealBasic, or other programming languages easier to work with."
If you're a programmer, sure. The advantage of VB is that it's (a) built into the apps, and (b) you might never have to see it. Just use the Record Macro option, and you can create some useful tools without ever seeing a line of code. The lack of VB (or any form of macro support, if that turns out to be the case) will have a great impact on the advanced non-programmer user; it will have minimal impact on programmers who can look elsewhere for solutions.
"Schwiebert also says that "VB for Mac Office hasnt been remotely compatible with VB for Win Office for years."
Funny then that I'm able to send an Excel 2004 file with macros to a Windows user, and they can open and use it, including running the macros. Not everything works, certainly, but I was able to build some relatively advanced spreadsheets that worked perfectly on Office on Windows.
-rob.

[llahsram]

"The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion." - Michael Crichton
"I am not here to argue any of his reasoning, as I lack the technical knowledge to do that. What I am here to do is to argue that...the MacBU made the wrong decision when it chose to drop VB from Office Mac." - Rob Griffiths
Rob, I love your Mac OS X Hints site. It's been a tremendous contribution to the OS X era. But this is getting ridiculous here. What on earth would possess you to write an article telling Microsoft what they should have done, when by your own admission, you don't understand the issues involved? The suggestions you make have already been addressed by the Microsoft folks and they've explained why they don't work.
Visual Basic for Applications was very old code with heavy dependencies on the PowerPC architecture. They barely got it working on OS X to begin with. To get it working on the Intel Macs would have required a ground-up rewrite of the entire Visual Basic engine for the Mac. And no, you can't just take the code from Windows, because it too is very old code with heavy dependencies on Windows. It would require a full rewrite.
This is not a simple "slipped date". This is delaying the release of an Intel-native Office for Mac by years. And for what? For a relatively tiny subset of users who need VBA macro support for Excel, many of whom are already going to be running Excel in Parallels because Office 2004's VBA support isn't even all that great (sure, macros from the Mac to Windows work OK, but vice-versa is the problem here). In the meantime, there are huge numbers of users who want an Intel-native version of Office (with XML format support and hopefully a WebKit-based renderer and improved Exchange support for Entourage) and have no need for VBA at all. And no, I don't think they would have been very accepting of the message that they'd have to keep running Office in Rosetta for years for a small contingent of Mac-using finance/engineering people who aren't running Parallels. Honestly, what makes more sense: denying everyone a new version of Office for years, or shipping one that at least has Intel support and then following it up with cross-platform macro support later?
And if/when cross-platform macro support is added, it still makes no sense to write a brand-new VBA engine. The future of automation for Office for Windows (according to Microsoft) is .NET; VBA is only supported by Office 2007 for compatibility, it is not part of the default install, and the default format for Office 2007 for Windows does not allow VBA macro code (there is now a separate format specifically for macro-enabled code). It would be far better for the Office team to modernize their code, get it working on Intel, get a new version out the door, and then look at fitting .NET support into the next version. And, in fact, there are hints that they might do just that . There is no point in spending years of development work writing a compatibility layer for a deprecated language. The (comparatively) small rewards are just not worth it.
I also don't think that this is due to any evil ingenious plan on the part of Microsoft. That's giving the company far too much credit. There's no grand vision at Microsoft; they keep the MacBU around because Office for the Mac makes money, pure and simple. And the loss of VBA support won't change that. There will still be more than enough people buying it for the reasons they always have: it's a decent enough suite with decent enough compatibility with the majority of Office for Windows documents. Is it ideal? Certainly not. But I think the MacBU is making the best they can of the mess they're in.

[rhp]

Rob,
Re: a) VBA was built into MS Office apps, not any other app on the Mac.
b) The VBA that I saw required a fair bit of programming knowledge. When I tried to use the "Record Macro", it didn't work very well--I still had to tweak the code. Automator, on the other hand, can provide that basic scripting functionality with the point & click ease that you mention. Additionally, Automator, as I mention, is integrated into other Mac OS X apps, including shell commands. And Automator is new...it will have better features in the future, I'm sure. Automator is the tool for non-programmers, which is where the MBU is, rightfully, focusing its efforts.
Maybe what Schwiebert was saying was that the integration of VBA into Mac Office is not as integrated into the OS as what Windows...enjoys...or has to endure b/c of the macro viruses (which hardly ever "worked" on a Mac...the Template worm in the mid-90s excepted). But, I won't speak for Schwiebert...just quote him when necessary. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif
But, as many have said: VBA is dead, not Mac Office...at least not now.

[HandyMac]

Actually, I think this is great news /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif It's now clear that Micro$oft's supposed desire to support the Mac platform was never more than a temporary political move; so we can get on to dealing with reality.
I've been a Mac user (only) since I got my first Plus (System 6) in 1988; I've never used any Micro$oft product, because it's always been clear to me what they were about, and I didn't want anything to do with it. Call me irrational, but I wouldn't have Dick Cheney in my house either; so long as the right of free association survives, I'll exercise it. Clearly there are those who would like to impose a New World Order in which everything we do is tracked and controlled, and clearly Micro$oft is part of this plan. From the level of consciousness where they live, no other "dream" or ideal is conceivable.
True, M$ has occasionally produced good Mac software -- Word 5, MSIE and Outlook in the waning days of OS 9 (I was told that Outlook was created by the same programmers who'd done Claris eMailer -- so what? so why'd they go to work for the Dark Side, then?) -- but I've always been able to find good alternatives, e.g. MacWrite II, iCab, Eudora.
Micro$oft has always been about buying (or copying) others' creative work, and doing the least and charging the most it can get away with; their idea of free-market competition is the Tonya Harding model: rather than put out the effort to show a better performance, find a way to kneecap your opponent beforehand so there won't be a competition.
Thus, although there may be real, valid programming reasons for this change (and some in the MBU may actually believe them), I've no doubt what the real reasons are: now that the Mac can run Windoze, it's completely in Micro$oft's interest to quit producing Mac-native software. You've read about how licensing will work with Windows' next, fully New-World-Order-enabled version? And why won't Vista's basic, (relatively) inexpensive version work with Bootcamp or Parallels? You get one guess. You really want to subject yourself to that?
You saw where Steve Ballmer (the real "soul" of Micro$oft) recently claimed that Linux users owe M$ a licensing fee -- apparently for using a GUI, which, it seems, is M$' intellectual property? You couldn't make this stuff up. But I certainly wouldn't want M$ to stop doing stuff like this; the more people see what they're really about, the more people will start to look for alternatives.
And is the Mac the alternative? I don't think so. The vast majority has never been interested in excellence, even when it costs no more; they just don't understand it, and it makes them nervous. Every long-term Mac user has experienced this, trying to talk to Windoze slaves who complain incessantly -- but can't conceive of switching. And I wouldn't want to see Apple take Micro$oft's place anyway; Apple is also a corporation, and already arrogant enough. As Lord Acton famously remarked, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
The real alternative to Windoze is Linux. Computer technology, like the internal combustion engine, is too important to the world for its basic foundation to be owned by anyone. My ideal computer future would see Linux as the worldwide standard, along with OpenOffice (and perhaps some other major apps, like The GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus).
In a Linux world, Mac OS would retain a small but solid niche market, for those who want the best and are willing to pay for it -- like Mercedes Benz and Steve's famous example, BMW. But a Linux world would not be hostile to Mac OS the way a Windoze world is; Linux is not really in cutthroat competition with anyone, and Mac OS X is its first cousin -- which makes porting Linux apps to Mac a lot easier than porting Windoze apps now is.
In the meantime, yes, WINE might be worth investing in. But you can be sure that it will require continual updating, as Windoze app compatibility will remain a moving target. M$ certainly has no interest in allowing anyone to run Windoze software without having to buy (and register, and register, and register -- and then buy again when your limited registrations run out) Windoze.
And no, I don't think iWork will ever be a real Office killer. Even if Keynote is superior (Pages is still pretty lame), it's too different: it doesn't look and feel like Office, so will never be seen by most corporate clone Office users as an alternative. And it's Mac only, "cross-platform" only by means of tedious "Save As" routines that most Office users will never want to learn.
After all, the real, bottom-line difference between M$ and Apple is that Apple is a hardware company; anything that makes for more Mac sales (and more Mac users able to keep their Macs in a world where the majority uses something else) is a plus. Which is why, BTW, I don't see Apple making a Windoze version of iWork; this would be a desperation move that (a) wouldn't sell more Macs, and (b) wouldn't work anyway.
What I'd really like to see is Apple joining Sun to invest in OpenOffice, to beef it up into a real M$Office killer, see to the production of a real, fully-compatible Mac version, and then bundle it with all new Macs. Is Apple smart enough to do this? OO is featured at the moment on Apple's "Unix & Open Source" Downloads page; it requires X11 at the moment (curiously, not mentioned), but that can (and will) be fixed.

[MacTel]

Quote:

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Hi Webraider,
Thanks for confirming what I suspected, and mentioned in my previous post.
Microsoft are moving away from the old VB, and towards a new .Net based technology.
I remembered reading about it, but couldn't pinpoint it.
As I remember, Office 2007 will be the first version to support the new scripting technology. It would be useful to have a little more information about what is actually going to happen in Office 2007.
That way we have a realistic idea about what will or won't be compatible between the Mac and Windows versions.

---

Nope, VBA is alive and well in Office 2007. There's no plan to replace that from what my pals say.
The scripting language you're probably thinking of is apart of PowerShell. This scripting environment is included with Exchange 2007 and will be shipped with Vista Server 2007. PowerShell was originally supposed to be included with Vista Client but there were security flaws found so its release was pushed back.
VB.Net has been around for almost 7 years and continues to be used by a large army of programmers. C# is Microsoft's preferred language but both languages will remain apart of Visual Studio for the long term as both share the .NET Framework libraries. The Office object models for the various applications are easily exposed and utilized with your favorite .NET language, so VBA is not neccessary in a corporate IT departments. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
It is usually the power users that record macros in accounting departments that can't live without VBA because they don't know how to code in the first place. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/blush.gif

[JEH]

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It doesn't matter if they kill Office for Mac... parallels saves the day... and I don't mean by running windows on a mac... using the new Parallels Cohercy mode, I literally run Office 2007 for Windows as a native Intel app....
Running parallels in cohercy mode with Office 2007 is FASTER than running Office 2004....
I won't buy the next version of Office for the Mac... I'm buying the windows version and running it in Parallels Cohercy mode.... literally, windows apps run like they are in finder, at twice the speed of a rosetta emulated app.

---

OK, I give up... what is "cohercy mode"? I presume this should be "coherency mde", but I find no mention of that in my Parallels documentation. Can you enlighten me (us)? Is this something like Wine purports to be, where you can run a Windows app without Windows?
Thanks
JEH

[griffman]

"What on earth would possess you to write an article telling Microsoft what they should have done, when by your own admission, you don't understand the issues involved? The suggestions you make have already been addressed by the Microsoft folks and they've explained why they don't work."
It's an editorial. I'm not allowed to have my opinions on what they should have done? This isn't a news article by any stretch. It's my opinion on how I believe Microsoft messed up with their VB decision.
"...up rewrite of the entire Visual Basic engine for the Mac. And no, you can't just take the code from Windows, because it too is very old code with heavy dependencies on Windows. It would require a full rewrite."
I understand that. That doesn't change my opinion of their decision. They have single-handedly removed any incentive for me to upgrade -- I counted last night; I have over 100 spreadsheets that employ macros to some degree. I have no desire to recode all of those. Hence, it's a stupid decision -- in my opinion (there's that word again).
"And for what? For a relatively tiny subset of users who need VBA macro support for Excel, many of whom are"
Says you that it's a small subset of users. The people posting here in support of retaining macros might imply otherwise. Truth is, neither of us knows the real numbers.
"huge numbers of users who want an Intel-native version of Office (with XML format support and hopefully a WebKit-based renderer and improved Exchange support for Entourage) and have no need for VBA at all. And no, I"
Why? What do they possibly gain from a simple UB version of Office? A Word document that scrolls to fast too see, as opposed to one that simply scrolls way to fast to read? I just don't see the upside of doing $20mil in development (or whatever it's going to cost) just to go UB. It makes no sense as I see it. Again, that's my opinion.
"Honestly, what makes more sense: denying everyone a new version of Office for years, or shipping one that at least has Intel support and then following it up with cross-platform macro support later?"
Since they've stated that they have no plans to add the support in later, I think that's a null argument. The options seem to be "ship now and have it gone forever" or "don't ship until it's ready." The "upgrade" to Office when it ships next year is going to have a new GUI ribbon, a larger Excel worksheet, and not need Rosetta. And, oh yea, it'll break every existing spreadsheet with macros. That's worth $399, just so you can say you've got the UB version?
"future of automation for Office for Windows (according to Microsoft) is .NET; VBA is only supported by Office 2007 for compatibility, it is not part of the default install, and the default format for Office 2007 for"
From what I've read, they've committed to VB support for many years to come (the number 'five' sticks in my head, but I'm busy googling for references). Why? Because the XP users had a major uproar when they heard VB would be yanked from Office.
"the door, and then look at fitting .NET support into the next version. And, in fact, there are hints that they might do just that . There is no point in spending years of development work writing a compatibility layer for a deprecated language. The (comparatively) small rewards are just not worth it."
I want my existing spreadsheets to work without rework, much as I can open a Word document I wrote many many years ago in Word 2004 today. I understand I won't get new features, but I should not lose existing features. That's not an upgrade. That's a downgrade.
"I also don't think that this is due to any evil ingenious plan on the part of Microsoft. That's giving the company far too much credit. There's no grand vision at Microsoft; they keep the MacBU around because Office for the Mac makes money, pure and simple."
I don't necessarily disagree with that statement, although the flip side is a compelling arugment. To run in Parallels, you'll need Vista Business ($299) and Office 2007 ($399 or $499). So we're looking at an extra $300 in revenue to Microsoft, minus the cost of the entire MacBU team (OK, keep a couple people around to work on Remote Desktop and mouse drivers). That's a huge revenue and income upside for Microsoft, and all they have to do to get it is introduce a Mac version of Office that won't sell very well, giving them an easy excuse to kill the product. All those finance geeks you just mocked for using macros would be all over that scenario in about 10 seconds.
But whether it's a grand plan or not, I stand by my opinion: this move marks the beginning of the end of Microsoft Office on the Mac.
"reasons they always have: it's a decent enough suite with decent enough compatibility with the majority of Office for Windows documents. Is it ideal? Certainly not. But I think the MacBU is making the best they can of the mess they're in."
OK, let's leave VB out of it. What single compelling reason will there be for anyone to upgrade? Is a UB worth $399? If very few people use VB, what percentage of people need spreadsheets bigger than 65,000 rows or 256 columns? I'm betting it's an even smaller percentage, and yet that's a "feature" they're touting in the upgrade. A ribbon bar? OK. But not for $399. XML file format compatibility? Already announced for existing versions of Office, going back (I believe) to v.X (and rumored to be native in Leopard's TextEdit anyway).
So even without the VB argument, I see few compelling reasons for people to upgrade: Universal binary is about the biggest one. I use Office 2004 extensively under Rosetta right now, and it runs fine. More than fine. It runs great, especially given how much faster all our Macs have gotten in the last 18 months. I don't know, but I just don't see a lot of people rushing out to plunk down $400 just to gain native status (and lose macro support).
Time will tell, but I stand by my opinion -- as you do yours, I'm sure. Only time will tell what the truth will be, of course. I expect that it lies somewhere between my position and yours.
-rob.

[griffman]

"OK, I give up... what is "coherency mode"?
It's a new feature in the public beta of the next release:
http://forums.parall...thread5997.html
-rob.

[PeterG]

Hey Rob,
Aren't you lucky it's the weekend with nothing to do but relax..........
Imagine if you printed your opinion last Monday. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif
Peter /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[rhp]

Rob,
One more last thing I will add...I can't help but think, philosophically, that you are thinking of things the way they were a few years ago. I don't know if you read it or not, but Steve Wozniak was on washingtonpost.com a few weeks ago. I quote, "A very incredibly age, when everything was astounding and fun and anything you did was 'cool', is largely over. To some young people, they must rediscover a lot of this stuff and have fun at it. Even programming today is not so easy to get into. Remember, the programming language BASIC, the most important part of these new machines, was in ROM in the Apple ][. What days those were!"
Times have changed and some things are still cool...but not programming. As another example, when I was growing up, you used to be able to work on cars...and I mean repair, not modify. No longer. Now it is "take it to the shop to have it fixed." And, they aren't called "mechanics" any more, but "technicians." The same thing has happened to computers. It is no longer "this guy in finance that can do computer stuff" but, a corporate IT department that everyone needs to go to in order to solve computer problems. Like it or not, that is the future. Apple, MS, Google, and others "know" it. For home users, there will be the Mac...
OK...one last last answer to your question of "why upgrade?" I have no answer other than to upgrade when XML is standard on both Windows and Mac Office...and that means that they will not sell many copies of Mac Office for a while. But "a while" is not "death." Most corporate IT departments have a site license that will allow them to upgrade for a nominal fee...and they will. Home users? They probably will keep what they have or migrate to an Open Office solution.
But, like you said...we will see where the future is...I think the Mac platform's future is bright...but, who really knows?

[griffman]

"The same thing has happened to computers. It is no longer "this guy in finance that can do computer stuff" but, a corporate IT department that everyone needs to go to in order to solve computer problems."
While that may be true in a 10,000 person company, for most small and mid-size businesses, there's just not the staff for it. We had 200 employees and two in IT. One kept the servers running, and the other ran around with his hair on fire doing desktop support. But I agree with the changes in general. However, Excel and macros are really a different story -- it's basically just building a spreadsheet with a degree of intelligence to it. And it's often not a project that can be farmed out to IT, given that things like salary, bonus plans, headcount reductions, etc. will be found in such documents.
"But, like you said...we will see where the future is...I think the Mac platform's future is bright...but, who really knows?"
I actually agree -- the future of the Mac platform has never been brighter. I just don't see Office for the Mac in that future /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
-rob.

[webraider]

Quote:

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OK, I give up... what is "cohercy mode"?

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Coherency Mode is what I thought virtualization was supposed to achieve in the first place albeit in a more invisible way... Parrallels version looks to run Windows apps while the OS is "invisible" thuse making it "look" like the app is running on the Mac...
What TRUE virtualization should be able to achieve is supplying PROGRAMS with the API calls so that Windows Programs could run on the Mac WITHOUT running any Windows OS! That's what I'm really waiting for. This is a step in that direction but hopefully someone will step up to the plate more. I'm much more tempted to run windows programs is I don't have to run the stupid OS! Then only forseable problem on this is that the Mac is more proan to Viruses this way. The mac software would be okay but the windows software might suffer the occasional cold.

[llahsram]

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It's an editorial. I'm not allowed to have my opinions on what they should have done? This isn't a news article by any stretch. It's my opinion on how I believe Microsoft messed up with their VB decision.

---

Of course you're allowed to have opinions. But the article isn't merely an opinion on some random blog; it's a call for action on a pretty high-profile site. You wrote, "Things have quieted down -- and I think thats a bad thing. This is a critical issue that demands attention." You're clearly trying to get people upset about this issue. And the opinion presented is that, although "Erik [went] into great detail as to how each of these issues made porting VB to the next version of Office basically impossible," Microsoft has made a mistake in not doing so. So we should all be mad at Microsoft and complain loudly that they have not done the impossible. Why? What is the point of causing anguish over something that cannot be changed?

Quote:

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The people posting here in support of retaining macros might imply otherwise. Truth is, neither of us knows the real numbers.

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Certainly. But the MacBU knows the numbers, and if they were large enough that it would have made it pointless to release Office 12 without VBA support, they wouldn't have decided to do it. But we have their decision, and I'm positive it wasn't made lightly, so we can guess that the numbers weren't significant enough in the big picture. Apparently they figure they can make enough off of things coming up in the new version that it will outweigh the loss of sales from those who need VBA support. Or rather, that the number of licenses sold to people who need VBA would not pay for the years of development it would take to write an entirely new engine for a dying language. The MacBU are the only ones who have the data to say whether it's a good or bad decision, and I don't think they'd give up the opportunity to make more money if they could.

Quote:

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Why? What do they possibly gain from a simple UB version of Office?

---

Well, Word is OK in Rosetta, but Entourage is really a dog. I suppose it depends somewhat on expectations, but I don't find the current performance of Office acceptable. Usable, yes, in the sense that window resizing in OS X 10.0 was usable. But I'd upgrade just for a faster Entourage with a web view that rendered CSS stylesheets properly. Functionally, it's not as huge as VBA for people who depend on it, but it's certainly an issue. I hear this all the time from people who have switched to the Mac from Windows: how come Office is so slow? And it's not just the perceived speed for end users: a lot of the work seems to have been getting off of CodeWarrior and moving away from deprecated APIs. The MacBU needed to modernize the code before developing it further, and native Intel support was just one aspect of that. It had to be done, even if the Intel change hadn't happened.

Quote:

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Since they've stated that they have no plans to add the support in later, I think that's a null argument. The options seem to be "ship now and have it gone forever" or "don't ship until it's ready."

---

Well, I think there are two separate decisions here. One is, "VBA will not be in the next version of Office, because we can't develop a brand new runtime that fast." The other is, "We're not going to develop a brand new VBA runtime at all, because by the time it's finished, it won't have much life left in it." The first decision is what I was referring to. There would be no point in waiting another few years to ship Office in order to include a VBA runtime, because in another few years there's going to be another version of Office anyway. If they were going to develop a new VBA runtime, they could just put it in then. In the meantime, people who don't need VBA can benefit from the increased speed and functionality from the interim upgrade.
The second decision -- not to create a new VBA runtime at all, even for a future version -- is, I'm guessing, because Microsoft as a whole is trying to push .NET rather than VBA, and the MacBU may be figuring that the time would be better spent working on the future platform rather than the past one. But that's harder to tell; they haven't talked as much about that as they have about not including VBA in this version.

Quote:

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All those finance geeks you just mocked for using macros would be all over that scenario in about 10 seconds.

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I apologize if it sounds as though I was mocking financial users; I didn't intend to. I have written VBA macros for finance groups and I understand their critical importance for many workflows. I am not by any means saying dropping VBA is a good thing. It's a terrible thing. I'm just saying that I understand the reasons they did it, I don't think they really had much choice given their options, and it's pointless to try to get people angry about it.

Quote:

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What single compelling reason will there be for anyone to upgrade? Is a UB worth $399? If very few people use VB, what percentage of people need spreadsheets bigger than 65,000 rows or 256 columns?

---

Interestingly enough, just a couple weeks ago someone came to me because they wanted more than 256 columns. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif But I agree: that's a pretty rare thing. I wasn't even aware that they were touting that as a feature, but then I don't think I've heard much of anything about Office 12 in terms of features. If anything, I've heard people complaining that the MacBU is so tight-lipped when the Windows Office team was fairly open during the development process. Still, what single compelling reason was there for anyone to upgrade to Office 2004? I'm sure that in addition to the UI updates we'll get new features, and different people will find different things compelling. Maybe there won't be any compelling feature to you, and the loss of VBA will make running Office 2004 in Rosetta a better option. That's certainly a perfectly valid difference of opinion. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

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The future of the Mac platform has never been brighter. I just don't see Office for the Mac in that future.

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It may be difficult to tell from this discussion, but I actually don't care much for Office, and a workable future without it would be bright indeed. I'm rather amused by the irony here that I'm defending Microsoft, since I'm not usually feeling very positive about them. But I believe the MacBU folks genuinely want to make a good product, and that they wouldn't drop something as big as VBA support without agonizing over it. I hate to see them given even more grief over an issue they've already suffered over. I'm defending the people more than the organization here. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[d00d]

[indent]Quote:

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Then only forseable problem on this is that the Mac is more proan to Viruses this way. The mac software would be okay but the windows software might suffer the occasional cold.

---

[/indent] This is a very real threat (even to the Mac OS itself). WINE sometimes emulates Windows APIs so well sometimes that they suffer the same security issues. The whole thing makes me queasy. Besides, making it too easy to run Windows programs on Mac makes it very tempting for some companies coughIntuitcough to just eschew the platform all together.