[calyth]

I think the more important point is to stem the tide of PC users who are switching to Mac. Given that Office 2007 goes down this path, potential non-technical switchers would say something like this: "I'd love to switch, but then there are all these Office documents from work that needs these macro things, and if I want to get it working, I'd need to find a nerd who knows how to use Parallels and install Office. If I need to pay extra to get this parallels software, I could just stick with a PC and forget about paying extra. It's cheapter to get a PC anyways".
It isn't that MS does not have the manpower to make VBA work on Mac. If it was their will to get that working, it would've been done (shoddily) by now. Any rosier, more optimistic beliefs in MS's tactics is suspect, such as, they could write a converter from VBA to Automator/AppleScript, or we will use NeoOffice (which has crappy macro support), or we will install parallels + MS office.
MS isn't concerned with those who are already converted: they know they can't get them to convert back to Windows, and they would only buy MS software very grudgingly, after failing to find suitable alternatives. MS is far more concerned with the potential of losing a sizable chunk of their existing customer base, if the Mac continues to be able to not only do the consumer stuff handily, but also the corporate stuff.

[montgomery_burns]

Quote:

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Microsoft has added the ability to use REALbasic in Office:mac and given the MBUs reasons for dropping VBA support, Microsoft, if they really gave a rats backside about Mac development, would do the same for Office for Windows.

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This is a good point. If Microsoft really believes what they are telling Mac users, that hardly anyone uses VBA so hardly anyone would notice the lack of VBA support, then they should have no problem dropping it from Windows Office as well. Yet the next version of Windows Office will still support VBA.

[jgalicinski]

Quote:

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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.

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How do you run Parallels in Cohercy mode? I don't see that option anywhere on my Parallels... I like the sounds of it though..
-Jason

[griffman]

Scan back in this thread; I linked to the public beta of a Parallels release that has the feature...
-rob.

[tomem]

Neither I nor ANYONE I know have ever used visual basic as part of Office.

[griffman]

So that means it's OK to take it out then? I know there are lots of people who never use VB in Office. But there are a number of people who not only use it, but rely on it.
By your analogy, Apple should remove Safari from OS X, since I never use it, though I've heard some people do.
-rob.

[d00d]

Sure. I've never used that table of contents thing. Let's axe that too. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

[bdkennedy1]

Office Mac has almost always been a bloated piece of horse-sh. Word 2004 is the only app I've ever seen that takes 15-20 seconds to start up and has to validate your fonts before it opens. Pages opens and exports to Word format, so I say good riddance, Mac Office. Ms. Ho and her team need to move on and get out of the Mac software business. Trust me, Apple WILL solve this problem. Any company that relies solely on one piece of software is shooting itself in the foot. That's like having an employee that has one particular skill that no one else has and then firing him or him quitting. You always make sure that someone else is trained with that skill. It's the same with software. Even Apple did this by keeping an Intel version of OS X around for 5 years, just in case...

[bsherin]

In Office 2004, microsoft claimed to have greatly "improved" applescript support. But what they actually did was alter it to follow in its own idiosyncratic rules that didn't follow the standard conventions. I have a little application that I use for my research work, that communicates with other application by sending appleevents to them, mostly simple cut and paste events. This works fine with most other applications, and worked fine prior to Office 2004. After I started using office 2004, I had to alter my application so that it dealt with the office apps as a special case.
All of this makes me very suspicious of how well microsoft is going to do when supporting applescript in the next version of office.

[mdawson]

Good point, although what I actually meant was that Microsoft should also include REALbasic functionality into Office for Windows. REALbasics Visual Basic Project Converter should make it less painful for VBA users to transition their code, thus allowing Microsoft to drop VBA across the board because a means to run documents with legacy VBA code will exist from a third-party developer. Microsoft will not need to dedicate development resources to legacy support of VBA and VB coders do not lose their huge investment in Visual Basic scripts.
Right now, I am not sure if the Visual Basic Project Converter works from within Office:mac for scripting, but I doubt it would take much for REAL to implement a full scripting environment that works from within Office. I am quite sure that REAL would be more than happy to get more exposure for their product. Even if Microsoft does go this route, it still does not exempt Microsoft from creating a fully compatible Mac version of whatever new scripting technology they choose to implement; which will most likely be .NET.
By the way, another point to the macro naysayers, if VBA were so unimportant, why would REAL put so much effort into VB compatibility?

[mdawson]

Well lets see:

[*]Most people do not use the reviewing feature in Word outside of research teams in academia writing refereed papers, so why not eliminate that feature.
[*]The track changes feature in Word is underutilized; got to go.
[*]I cannot think of too many people that use pivot tables in Excel, that should go, too.
[*]Excel Add-ons... who needs those?
[/list]The simple fact of the matter is that Office applications are all-skill software. That is, they are predominantly used by people that will never go beyond the fundamental functionality of any given Office application, but they also provide a complete feature set providing features that are not only used in various combinations by power users, but that said power users have come to rely on. Without a viable alternative or a means to operate or transition legacy documents, any new version of Office is a downgrade.
How about this, from now on every time a new version of Office is released, your existing documents become obsolete requiring you to recreate every single document you ever created from scratch. That is exactly what you aloof post insinuates is a perfectly acceptable way for Microsoft to handle software development.

[mdawson]

While I can agree with the gist of your post, it has a vein of fantasy to it. Microsoft, in typical Gatesian fashion, eliminated competition in the productivity suite market years ago. You can perhaps count the number of companies, institutions of higher learning and government agencies that are not using Office on both, if not just one, of your hands. Pages is far from a Word-killer and Keynote is not available for Windows making it useless to most people despite that fact that it is reportedly better than PowerPoint. There are also the open source alternative, but as they do not run on Windows and Macs are nearly non-existent in the corporate setting their existence has no impact on what people will use. Lastly, while these alternative may offer Office compatibility, they will never be 100% compatible.
Until some major paradigm shifts occur, Microsoft Office is the industry standard and is very likely to remain so for a long time due to inertia. The same can be said of products like AutoCADseveral better CAD packages that can import AutoCAD drawings, are more modern and user-friendly have existed for yearswhich is still in heavy rotation despite its clunky functionality compare to the competition. That which is the industry standard will not be quickly supplanted regardless of what the alternatives offer.

[lkrupp]

"This is a win-win for both party. MS does not have to support the Mac Office version anymore while Mac user can still run MS Office."
Absolutely! And Adobe will soon follow suit with Photoshop. And so will Quark, and Intuit, and the rest of the major developers. And then there will no real reason to run OS X at all. Some of us have been predicting this since the arrival of Boot Camp. The hand writing is on the wall.
This is a lose-lose for the OS X platform if it comes to pass.

[hayesk]

Will you guys give it a rest. All tomem said was he doesn't know anyone who uses VB. Is he not entitled to weigh in, or are only people who depend on VBA allowed to contribute.
Everyone here is saying it will be the end of Office if VBA is taken out. tomem was only saying that there are users out there who don't rely on it, implying that there are plenty of users out there who will still use office in the future, without VBA, so it's not as gloomy as you make it out to be. But yet you guys feel the need to jump all over him.