No Visual Basic in Office 2008? No thanks.

I almost hate to say it, but I almost have to say who cares. Run Parallels in coherence mode and buy the windows version of office.

Due to the volume licensing we have at work, I can get a copy of either the mac version or the windows version of office for $20 through "home use" licensing. After playing with both verisons for a while, I ended up with Parallels.

The performance is the same, and no matter how many features the Mac Business Unit adds to office, the Windows version is going to always have more cutting edge features.

The argument that it's too much work doesn't ring true to me. It wasn't too much work when it was originally done, so why is it too much work now?

According to the Wikipedia entry for Visual Basic for Applications MS plans to eventually phase out VBA in favour of Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA). With that in mind the decision to scrap VBA on the mac makes more sense.

In response to Martin's post (#1), there are services you can install that will let you do text manipulation (change to lowercase, etc.) in any well-written app. Presumably services will be usable in Office 2008. I'd also presume they'll add a "paste and match formatting" option like Pages has.

hehe That's like the Photoshop-developers leaving out the Layers-functionality or something from CS3 beacuse it's a lot of work.
Some feautures are necessities, and will have to be solved no matter what, you can't just opt out of key feautures, EVEN if you are a die-hard developer like Joshua..

While I feel everyone's pain on this, I'm actually glad for the lack of VB support. Now I won't get all those annoying "features" in spreadsheets when all I want to do is fill in the blanks on my expense report. And, one of the last vectors for for Trojans has been shut off of my Mac!

Yeah, it was snotty. I'm tired of people always assuming "such and such is evil or lazy" and oversimplifying complex problems:

"This is incredibly low but I'm not at all surprised. MS knows that home users (their primary target for the MacBU) will buy it anyways, and this way they guarantee Macs can't make any inroads in the corporate market. It's a win/win for them (it just screws us)."

That's what brought on the snottiness.

Re- NeoOffice

From the page Eli linked to:

"NeoOffice 2.1 will be one of the only available ongoing solutions for Mac users who use VBA macros in their Excel documents"

At first, I read the Schwied blog and thought 'Shame, but fair enough'

Then I thought, 'Not Microsoft's fault. They didn't know Apple was about to switch to Intel, did they?'

Then I learn that NeoOffice can handle VBA.

How is it that NeoOffice can do it, yet Microsoft can't.

Both had the same amount of notice that Apple was switching to Intel.

I have NeoOffice on this machine. I hardly use it, as I also have MS Office.

But this caught my eye:

"The NeoOffice 2.1 release will allow Mac users to utilize OpenXML documents prior to the announced availability of translators from Microsoft"

How is it NeoOffice seems to be developing at a much faster pace than MS Office?

Has anyone actually read the reasoning behind this?

http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/

Yes it sucks but it would have been a nightmare to port it.

Problem solved: http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=116

NeoOffice should get more love on TUAW :)

#4's post was a bit snotty, but the blog post he linked to is actually a good read. You guys should read it.