How does that old Chinese proverb go? “May you live in interesting times!” I have no idea how accurate it is, or whether it is a positive blessing or a curse, but I really do live (and work) in interesting times.
Almost two years ago, back at WWDC in August 2006, the MacBU announced that Office 2008 would not have support for Visual Basic. I blogged about it at the time, and that one post has proven to be my 15 minutes of Internet fame. It continues to be the most popular post on my site — 21 months later, it still accounts for almost half of all the hits I get each week. While most of our customers don’t require the cross-platform scripting enabled by VBA, a section of the Mac community spoke out very vocally against our decision, and I still hear echos of it to this day. At the time, I wrote about the challenges we faced in bringing it forward with the rest of Mac Office 2008 and why we ended up deciding to remove the feature, but while some people understood or at least accepted the details, some in the community did not. I’ve been told that we must have cut VB to intentionally drive users to use virtualization and Windows Office 2007 on Macs, or that we were ordered by upper Microsoft management to slowly kill the Mac, or any one of a zillion other “Microsoft is evil” conspiracy theories. None of these theories are true, but it’s rather hard to prove that, except by deeds.
This isn’t a done deed yet, but I’ve got a new commitment for you. Quoting from a press release that went out from the MacBU at 12:01am PST today:
VBA Returns to Future Versions of Office for Mac
The Mac BU also announced it is bringing VBA-language support back to the next version of Office for Mac. Sharing information with customers as early as possible continues to be a priority for the Mac BU to allow customers to plan for their software needs. Although the Mac BU increased support in Office 2008 with alternate scripting tools such as Automator and AppleScript — and also worked with MacTech Magazine to create a reference guide, available at http://www.mactech.com/vba-transition-guide — the team recognizes that VBA-language support is important to a select group of customers who rely on sharing macros across platforms. The Mac BU is always working to meet customers’ needs and already is hard at work on the next version of Office for Mac.
Yep, you read that right. VB is (well, will be) back, baby! When we came to the realization in 2006 that there was no way for us to keep VB in the product and still ship Office 2008 on any semblance of the schedule we wanted, we announced its removal, but kept looking at how to bring it back into the suite even before we shipped. Many of the technical challenges I wrote about then still remain, but for a while now I and several others have been working with a group of people who know a heck of a lot about the internals of VB, and once we determined that we could achieve the revival VB in the new schedule for the next version of Mac Office, we locked it into place on the feature list.
Personally, I think it’s really cool that we’re announcing this now. For all the wringing-of-hands and gnashing-of-teeth in the Mac community over the lack of VB, Mac Office 2008 has been selling really well (Craig Eisler, our General Manager and all around cool-boss-guy, said “The response has been amazing — since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004″ in that same press release) which seems to indicate that most of our users don’t find the lack of VB to be a major issue. I think our management is confident enough in our ongoing sales of Office 2008 to tell you about something very significant in the next version, even if that defers some sales to that next version. Based my own experiences talking with people in various Internet forums, I don’t think too much of that will happen, though. And if you were wondering, the delta between Office 2004 and 2008 was longer than we normally expect between versions, so my understanding is that this next version will be available somewhat sooner than 2012 (I can’t give any specifics at this time, however.)
So, if you have a dire need for Visual Basic, you can continue to run Mac Office 2004 (it will even run side-by-side with Office 2008) and we’re publicly committing to VB as good (maybe even better, if things go well) in the next version. My team is responsible for that reintegration, and I’ve been meeting frequently with a number of people as we’ve planned exactly what we’re doing and how we’re bringing VB back. This seems to me to be a strong example for the MacBU naysayers that we’re really listening to what all of our users want, and that we’re most definitely not slow-marching to some bagpiper’s funereal drone!
I’m excited to be able to blog about this now, after almost two years of keeping my lips zipped, and I can’t wait until we reveal everything else about the next version of Mac Office. In the meantime, let me ask you something. What parts of the Visual Basic experience are most important to you? The IDE? Macro UI, such as dialogs? Object model parity between Mac Office and Windows Office? (and if so, which features in the Windows object model do you most want brought to the Mac?) Or something else altogether? I can’t promise to achieve anything in particular, but I’d love to hear how we might be able to improve upon the 2004 VB experience for you.
(Made a few edits this morning, and added a link to the press release.)
good news, but if I’m reading correctly, its still 3-4 years till that office is available.
Is macbu going to commit to
- an extended lifecycle for office 2004, including on NEW OSX versions
Is macbu going to consider
- providing a sidegrade option for 2008 customers in the interim?
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sorry, it’s difficult to get excited about vapourware, i think i’ll stick to iWork.
It would be good if you guys could put down “speed” as a feature as well. Office 2008 is faster than Office 2004, but still seems much, much slower than Pages 2 or Office 2007 running in VMware.
@Tony Arnold: Seconded. Still far slower than Office 2007, especially at startup.
Most important aspect of Visual Basic: its use in Adobe Acrobat’s PDFMaker, allowing Word documents to be turned into PDF documents complete with (1) all sections combined into a single PDF file, (2) manually inserted hyperlinks active, (3) each subdivision appearing as a bookmark and (4) table of contents allowing navigation to each subdivision of the document. This, as opposed to relying on OS X’s printing to PDF from within Word, which (1) creates a PDF file per section, (2) kills all hyperlinks, (3) creates no bookmark and (4) does not turn table of content entries into hyperlinks.
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Intellisense is what makes VB so nice to program with.
Try and make an IDE that doesn’t require too much window management. SDI is always horrible and counter-productive. All we need is a lightweight MDI editor as elegant and straight forward as good old VBE in Office XP.
Cocoa interface / 64-bit throughout plz.
I have to admit that I’m not a big user of VBA, but it’s great if VBA support makes it back to Office for Mac, since it’s always those occasional documents that don’t work that are the most frustrating.
My concern with VBA support is whether it’ll be worthwhile for spend time on it given the timeframe of completion of 2-3 years. Perhaps I am wrong, but I was under the impression that as part of the .NET transition, Microsoft was encouraging people to move from VBA to VSTA/VSTO since VBA will no longer be receiving significant enhancements. If that is the case, wouldn’t it be more worthwhile to integrate a full featured implementation of VSTA/VSTO into the next Office for Mac? There may not be many VSTA/VSTO users now, but I presume it’d be more common in 2-3 years, and having good integration would probably put Office for Mac seemingly ahead of the game rather than just catching up with VBA. Having both VBA and VSTA/VSTO would be even better, of course, but I guess there would be a trade off from having to split development resources.
In terms of VBA for Office 2008, I know it wouldn’t be reasonable to have a full UB port done for an already shipping product. However, I was just curious whether it was possible to tack on the PPC VBA from Office 2004. From your previous blog post on not having VBA for Office 2008, I got the feeling that the most difficult part of moving VBA was the execution engine due to it’s PPC specific state machine. Would it be possible to just make the changes necessary to move everything to Xcode, but not bother to port things over to Intel, and make VBA PPC only? That would seem to avoid having to recreate code that was already custom made for PPC. It would mean having to start Office 2008 in Rosetta on Intel Macs in order to get VBA support, but it would still be better than having no VBA at all. And non-VBA documents could still run natively on Intel. It could be released as a patch, say Office 12.5, and perhaps only offered to Standard Edition and up, with an upgrade option for Home and Student Edition users, if that will help offset the development costs and it would definitely be a nice stop-gap measure until full VBA is restored in the next office version.
A Lam
I believe this is a vital move to keep Office alive on the Mac in corporate or business environments. As IT Manager, I will not be purchasing any copies of Office 2008, but instead will struggle along with Office 2004, the doc converter, and maybe touches of OpenOffice to get us by until a VBA-ready Intel version of Office is ready.
And yes, PLEASE, if you are starting the ground work, make it seamless with the Windows object model so that scripts truly are cross-platform! I know that there is not 100% feature parity, but if at all possible, if a feature/object/method/etc. CAN be ported and made platform-neutral, then MAKE IT SO.
Thanks!
Awesome! It would be nice if Mac VBA emulated some of the popular COM objects used in Win VBA scripts, particularly MSXML.
MJB, according to this page, support for Office 2004 ends in 2009. I’m not sure what you mean by a ‘sidegrade’ for Office 2008.
A Lam, unfortunately, no, that can’t be done. Rosetta runs at the process level, so PPC VBA would not work on an Intel Mac unless the hosting app was also running in PPC mode.
I’m glad to see VBA support coming back to Mac Office. Please keep the tight edit/test loop that VBA offers to developers now. Beyond the core VBA capabilities, I reference the Microsoft Scripting Runtime so that or comparable on the Mac would be great to have available. I’d also like to see Web Services available to VBA vs. having to climb the learnig curve to use Visual Studio as seems to be required for Office 2007 Windows.
GREAT news – they LISTENED!!!! Hurray!
This is good news for all power-users.
“A Lam, unfortunately, no, that can’t be done. Rosetta runs at the process level, so PPC VBA would not work on an Intel Mac unless the hosting app was also running in PPC mode.”
That was kind of what I was implying. I believe that documents with VBA opened in Office 2008 currently display a message saying that they aren’t supported asking to open and delete macros, cancel or open. Would it be possible for that message to instead give an option to restart the app in Rosetta if you want to use macros? I don’t have much Mac programming experience, but I found a reference to a sysctlbyname function which is supposed to force the start of the PPC executable in a universal binary. It’s not a very elegant solution since users will probably have to save other open documents before restart, unless PPC/Rosetta and Intel Office apps can be open at the same time, but it was just an idea I came up with when flipping through Apple’s Universal Binary documentation.
A Lam
Great announcement! Not to be a bit of a downer but I have to say that this statement rubs me the wrong way (and likely many other Mac users who have to use the tools created by the MacBU in a corporate environment)…
“Personally, I think it’s really cool that we’re announcing this now. For all the wringing-of-hands and gnashing-of-teeth in the Mac community over the lack of VB, Mac Office 2008 has been selling really well (Craig Eisler, our General Manager and all around cool-boss-guy, said “The response has been amazing — since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004? in that same press release) which seems to indicate that most of our users don’t find the lack of VB to be a major issue.”
The fact that Mac Office is selling well has no bearing on the quality of the product (or the fact that people don’t find the lack of VBA a major issue). We don’t have a choice! I bought Office 2008 to have decent (not great) Exchange support and a version of Word that supports the new file formats. The fact that VBA was killed makes Excel about as useful as Paris Hilton (on a good day). I have to use RDC to access Excel on a PC to do any work. I purchased Office, but that does not mean the lack of VB is not a major issue for me – it is.
Hopefully the MacBU will start to realize this and look at performance, reviews, and user satisfaction as the ultimate measure of success (and not copies shipped)!
Great to hear you guys are bringing back cross platform scripting, but I’ve always wondered why better options like C# with .NET isn’t possible for writing excel/word macros.
I agree that the comeback of VBA is quite nice, congrats.
I would prioritize a major revamp of the UI, at least get rid of the modal dialogs and the floating formula bar and come to the only sane conclusion that the “optimal” size of a document does not equal a 30″ monitor.
And the speed… *Copying* a line of about 10 cells should not take 10 seconds on a MBP not even if are a few fancy graphs on the same sheet (I sampled it, it is drawing something in vain). I hope the next service pack fixes some of the fundamental problems, a wait of 2-3 years would be less than great.
And yes, there is no alternative, well maybe Windows Office under a virtual machine, but I’d hate run Windows just to get my weekly spreadsheet routine done.
The return of VBA is most welcome – though I second some of the above comments/concerns about the move to VSTA/VSTO in Office 2007, and how that will affect corporate environments when the next version (Office 2012?!) is released.
That said, even object model parity with Office 2007 (or even Office 2003) will transform the Mac corporate environment, for Excel in particular. The previous state of VBA on the Mac was hideous anyway — Office 2004 was unable to parse some of the simplest VBA code created by non-specialists in a one-day “Introduction to VBA” course.
In the end – Mac BU has to make a decision about what to support –– and hopefully alongside VBA, Mac BU will consider better feature parity in other areas – e.g. the new Word 2007 equations, and reducing the large list of unsupported Excel 2007 features e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:OOXML-Excel-Issues.png
As Microsoft realises, the reason Office 2008 sells so well is precisely because it is the “most cross-platform compatible suite on the market for the Mac”. Taking this line, the return of VBA is most welcome; and if the Mac BU considers bringing feature parity in other areas, I am sure Microsoft/Mac BU will be rewarded with fantastic sales for the next version, too!
With OOXML now out of the way, I am very hopeful for improvements to other areas of Office – and look forward to hearing the progress in all these areas.
I understand that in the corporate world, executives who live the charm of the Macbook Air, do want their software to work as it would under Windows, this is, having the same VBA scripts.
Personally I think this is not the right direction. I would love to see some IronPython (or IronRuby) scripting instead of VBA, It’s not like VBA is going to last forever when you got better scripting alternatives.
And this should change also in the Office for Windows (but you may not have power over that).
But better VBA than nothing, but since VB.next (dunno if you will use that version) is going to be DLR-based, you might as well support JScript, IronPython and IronRuby. That would be a small step to change the current status of scripting languages.
“The response has been amazing — since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004?
Hmm, you just quoted Eisler instead of putting it in your own words. This gives me more evidence that this quote is deliberately designed to mislead – it says that the *velocity* of sales is greater than Office 2004. This means that the derivative of sales is greater – that is, the sales are growing at a faster rate than for 2004. Presumably, then, since Eisler didn’t say it, the actual number of sales so far is less. Or maybe it’s just business language trying to be too formal and misusing the word “velocity”, and you thought he worded the point the best way possible.
“Velocity of sales” as a metric of success means little when you don’t know the buyer’s motivations. Are they buying it because they know what Office 2008 offers? Or maybe they’re switching from a PC and just assume that Office 2008 will be the same as their Office 2007 on Windows. In my experience as an IT support person, it’s almost always the latter. And I’m the one that has to field the calls from people wondering why it doesn’t work right and how to make it work right. The ONLY answer I have for those users is to run Office 2007 (or whatever Windows version they prefer) in a VM of some sort.
The entire Office 2008 direction was flawed. The VBA component was just a minor aspect of that.
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Rory, i simply quoted Craig from the PR. I think he just misused the word velocity — I believe the actual count of sold copies is significantly higher than 2004 in the same time period. I wasn’t around when he made the quote.
What about color-coded Worksheet tabs in Excel?
PivotCharts?
Advanced data sorting & filtering (ie: Filter by Color)
Improved Conditional Formating
Table & Cell styles in Excel?
“the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004? which seems to indicate that most of our users don’t find the lack of VB to be a major issue.”
Oh, man. Seriously?
There are several “major issues” at work in that figure. Your initial sales were likely high because Office 2008 is:
A. A Universal Binary suite that doesn’t require resources for Rosetta (the last major app to get there), and
B. Is recent enough to demand good Leopard and Intel support from Microsoft (unlike the aging 2004), and
C. Supports the new XML formats (without an additional converter), and
D. Increased, to some degree, Entourage’s integration with Exchange (although not as much as some had hoped).
Just because that was enough to cause people to buy it IN SPITE of the lack of VBA does not mean that VBA isn’t a major issue. It is, and I think everyone can see that.
That is such a relief I was starting to think about having to find a apple scripter [which I can say they aren't too easy to find.
Two big generally address
1. [already mentioned] the better use of PDF, for compiling Multiply worksheets [workbook] into 1 PDF and hyperlinks and contents table for word
2. BETTER SECURITY, not making it so ridiculously easy to crack into both the front and back ends of excel, exposing people hard work.
Protecting users if they for forget a password is old school thinking, we all have to manage many passwords in out online life this should be no exception,
Excel is a professional application is should carry the same Dignity and be allowed to perform accordingly [or at least the option to have high security] I believe it has been lifted up from 2-bit to 32-bit, but its still not strong enough.
please help protect us!
thanks
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I need EndNote to work in Office 2008! That’s it!
Well…you asked about features. I’d like to see feature parity between Office 2008 and Office for Windows. For example, Entourage lacks several key features found in Outlook such as being about to mark an invitee as “optional”. OWA does this and it’s web based, why not Entourage. I also rate stability quite high. While Office 2008 is fair, I’ve had Word crash on me when working on documents created in older iterations of Office for Windows.
And since we’re dreaming, it’d be nice to have Mac versions of Visio and Project. Omni and Project Wizards make decent products but, again, for 100% compatibility with my Windows using colleagues and customers this would be nice to see.
I’m not a VBA user but others I know are. And since I do have to open their spreadsheets and documents it’s either I do so using Office 2004, iWork or Open Office.
It’s be great if it could be turned off. I for 1 am enjoying the freedom from the word macro viruses.
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Solver and statistic tools–our company relies on these tools to make some business decisions. Will these be present in the next version too, as their dependencies include VBA, or will we have to buy third-party solver tools as well?
Just do what ever you have to do so we can get Endnote working again!
Thing that need improvement in Mac Office: Entourage is still a pale imitation of Exchange, and is hardly a real replacement. It doesn’t even come close to feature parity like the other apps do. Still no note and task syncing? Come on! After 4 years of waiting the lack of improvement between the two versions of Entourage besides the native-ness is sad: Adobe did the transition faster and better for a more complex suite. And for being a universal binary, Mac Office ’08 is barely faster than ’04 running in Rosetta. The lag when I open or save a document is pathetic. And while I’m dreaming, how bout OneNote? Notebook layout view isn’t nearly the same.
Office is dead … you guys just don’t realize it yet
Object model parity with modern versions of Office for Windows (2003 or 2007) should be the number one priority, with stability a close second. Thirdly, resurrect the analysis toolpak, solver, most add-in support, regular old chart wizard (this didn’t disappear due to lack of VBA did it?), and other components that went missing at the same time as VBA.
If there’s time left over after reintegrating VBA, please consider doing something about the abysmal performance and stability of Excel when working with large spreadsheets. In my casual testing, the time it takes to recalculate is often between five and 20 times as long as Office for Windows on the same hardware. It also seems to crash about that much more often. I’m not holding my breath, but any improvement in that front would make the next version of Office a very easy sell around here.
As an aside, for Office 2008, it would be absolutely thrilling to have the option to disable that weird, obnoxious, gray row of buttons (“Elements Gallery”?) across the top of each document that does very little besides waste valuable, limited, screen space.
My wist list for VBA in MacOffice 20xx:
1. Record a macro. Recording keystrokes/mouse clicks in the 2004 VBA was very useful to get a basic structure and then manually edit.
2. Cross platform compatibility with Windows 200x. I realize there are some platform differences that cannot (and maybe should not) be on the other, but the level of compatibility in Excel 2004 met my needs. The new VBA should do no less.
All in all, this is great news. Looking forward to more info as you can release it — especially how you were able to overcome the technical problems you bloged about before 2008 was released.
SPEED, SPEED, SPEED, SOEED AND SPEED, especially in excel !
More UI Goodness from office 2007
Feature parity
What about the new .Net Visual basic replacementt. We want feature parity with windows when it ships.
also make sure we can triggers appescipt from vba
This is very good news! I have long hoped for a revision of the “NO VBA” decision, but nearly given up.
Just yesterday I had to inform an IT person of a swiss school who recently bought Office 2008, that the school can no longer use our Word add-in for teachers, due to the missing VBA. We have a lot of Mac customers – individual teachers and whole schools – in Switzerland and some in Germany. Though we tried to warn them not to change to Office 2008 we keep getting complaints from frustated Office 2008 buyers.
As for wishes:
1. Full compatibility with Word VBA for Windows. Because our add-in has grown over many years (beginning with WinWord 2.0, then WinWord 6.0, when we first ported it for MacWord and so on), there are large parts of the code still using the WordBasic object. So full integration of the Wordbasic object is essential for our needs.
2. We’d like to make our Mac version fully feature compatible with the Windows version. For that we need the same quality of Unicode support as in the modern WinWord versions.
3. We do some rather tricky things with tables in Word to automatically produce educational crossword and wordsearch puzzles from selected word lists. Filling and formatting tables by code has become awfully slow even in WinWord, but more so in MacWord over the years. We’d like to have more speed, if possible.
Please consider making this “feature” something that is disabled by default. That way the “select group of customers who rely on sharing macros across platforms” can enable it (along with the risks it presents) – and the rest of the world can have some comfort in knowing they aren’t going to be at the front of the next “script kiddy VBA hack” revolution.
The only reason I run Mac Office is because I share documents with customers that, in some cases, require me to fill out their existing documents that are heavily loaded with macros. (Timesheets, for example.) If it weren’t for that, I’d be using the iWork tools exclusively.
Thus, having Mac Office be incompatible with Windows Office renders it totally useless to me. This is why I won’t be buying Office 2008, period: it would do me absolutely no good.
The same goes for the next version. If it’s not totally compatible with the Windows version, it won’t do me any good either. I can’t tell you what features those are, because I don’t know how the macros have been written; I also don’t believe I can supply you with a sample timesheet, for example, because of confidentiality issues. (Even if I thought you’d use it to ensure compatibility, which I don’t; you’ve got your own regression tests.)
First of all, thanks for this blog post! It’s very cool to see that you are bringing back a feature based on customer feedback. Unfortunately I have no real need for VBA, but nevertheless, very cool that decisions like these are not set in stone and you guys are open to change. So thanks for that.
What I personally would like to see in the next version, or heck even this version, is quite simply SPEED. I have canceled my order for Office 2008 based on the review on the web. Really, Office needs to be fast faster fastest if you want me as a customer. Other applications can do it. Alledgedly, Office ’08 was rewritten in XCode, right? Then I can’t wrap my head around that it’s slower than Office ’04 on intel macs under Rosetta. It just makes no sense.
So please, if anything, make SPEED the focal point of development. Hey I might even return as a customer!
As one of a small, but growing, number of folks using a Mac in a Windows-centric corporate environment, the lack of VBA scripting compatibility has been a real pain for me. Please bring back compatibility with macros (in both Excel and Word) as soon as you can–it would save me no end of grief and let me quit having to fire up my corporate Dell laptop every time I need to crunch through a spreadsheet that uses some commercial statistics Excel plug-in modules. While you’re at it, can we please have back the previously built-in “Solver” function–it again is one of those business things that 99% of Excel users don’t even know exists but is critical to those of us in the business world.
Sure, all you home users can just sneer and talk about how VB scripts are just so passe, how Automator is better, or how the whole world should just dance around merrily in OpenOffice, but here in the corporate world no one cares about all that when everyone else on your 30-person team except you can fill out the accounting department’s VB macro-laden expense report in Excel on Windows. Fully compatible ross-platform scripting is a basic requirement if you want to see the Mac platform succeed in corporate environments.
Th entire Mac Office UI completely disregards the idea of “fitting in” to the Mac Apps Idea. In entourage, for example, I can’t remove search or the mai/calendar/etc selector from the toolbar, or even move them. I cannot, in any of the document editing apps, turn off that painfully useless “Elements Gallery”. While I understand many users find these useful, it still misses the point of things that function a certain way in EVERY OTHER APPLICATION on Mac OS X do not work in Office apps.
On to the topic of VBA though, my make-or-break functionality that prevents me from using ANY version of Excel for Mac (and stuck in the awful VM/Windows/2007 world that you claim was not the driving business factor) is to get my beloved heroforge to work properly. http://www.nzcomputers.net/heroforge/ This is a very heavily scripted app that only really works in Excel for Windows. I wish I didn’t have to cart around an extra 8 gigs of dedicated space, print seperate worksheets to PDFs, move these sheets across a virtual network, then concatenate and print them. I would love to simply have this work natively, not waste disk space, power (VMWare is AWFUL when it comes to CPU idling, not to mention the RAM usage) and my precious time.
I’d love to see this promise come to fruition, but I hesitate to consider this anything more than vaporware at the moment.
As a professor in a university, it is 100% critical to have feature parity with Office for Windows (2003/2007). I receive homework/projects, etc, from students who use all versions of Windows and all versions of Office. I must be able to read and write those files.
When creating my own, it is essential that I be able to use the equation editing facilities in Word. Please return this feature! (and please, why not use the same one in PowerPoint as well? It makes no sense to have different ones in different programs. Anyone writing documents with equations must also present that work!) This is supposed to be an office suite, not a random collection of independent programs.
How about returning histograms to Excel? An extremely important feature for me.
I am one of those “purchasers” of Office 2008, but I have not yet installed it (it has been sitting on my shelf for months and months). I’m waiting until I cannot avoid it any longer, and the delay is completely determined by the VBA issues.
I think we all agree that the success of Microsoft Office on the Mac platform is good for both Microsoft and Mac users alike. However, like many others have stated hear, I’m disappointed in the conclusion you’ve come to regarding the importance of VBA support as it relates to sales.
Geoff hit the nail on the head when he mentioned consumers wanted a Universal Binary, better Leopard support, support for new xml based file formats and better exchange server support. However, it’s also fair to mention that Apple’s Macintosh sales have increased considerably since 2004.
Kevin made a good point in that most users who purchase Office 2008 don’t know the first thing about VBA, but they do expect their documents to work seamlessly with their Windows based counterparts. I agree with this. To that end, I’d recommend object model / compatibility should be considered the highest priority in your VBA port as opposed to the IDE, etc.
While I see many improvements in Office 2008, I also view it as an interim product due to the lack of VBA support. There are performance issues which have been widely documented. I understand much of this is based on your switch to Xcode, etc. For that reason, you get a pass on this release. Still, we expect much better performance with the next release.
Finally, I do expect Microsoft Office to remain a popular product. However, I also have to believe Office 2008 (without VBA support) opens a window for existing consumers to consider alternatives. The assumption that people will stick with Office 2004 (for VBA compatibility) is flawed. I’ve already had people ask me about spreadsheet’s they’ve received from someone that “don’t work” properly with Office 2008. After directing them to NeoOffice, they were amazed that the “free” product worked. They also felt foolish for purchasing Office 2008. I don’t know how common incidents like this will be, but I have to acknowledge that users are now forced to consider alternatives in the name of compatibility. Let’s hope the next version of Office ships sooner than expected.
“So, if you have a dire need for Visual Basic, you can continue to run Mac Office 2004 (it will even run side-by-side with Office 2008)”
What about downgrade rights? Does the Office 2008 EULA include downgrade rights? That is do I need a separate full licence of 2004 in order to run it alongside 2008?