Also, this situation begs the question “Why don’t you put the Office 2004 VBA into a service pack for those of us who bought 2008 and had to ‘downgrade’???

MacMasters

It was not a question of there not being a particular interface (VBA) available to me, but the fact that there was NO interface available at all. Without an SDK or a detailed interface, we had no method by which to provide the functionality required by our users.

Be it XCode, VBA or a some other method – please give us an interface that we can use to extend the functionality of Excel to meet the needs we have. My requirements are not met by off-the-shelf products, and more than likely never will be. I doubt that I am alone.

It may not have been intentional, but that’s the only way I have been able to run Excel on my Mac and maintain compatibility with Office 2007.

It’s not just the lack of VBA, it’s the crippled filtering, the lack of graduated color conditional formatting, the lack of filter by color, the lack of sort by color, all features that I became dependent on in 2007.

Microsoft is in denial about the lack of compatibility, look at this page:-

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/office2008/why-office.mspx

“Compatibility is Essential
No one likes being caught off guard, especially when the pressure’s on. That’s why it’s vital that shared documents, presentations, and spreadsheets open as they were designed—regardless of the computer or operating system.”

and

“Microsoft ensures that Office 2008 for Mac is forward, backward, and cross-platform compatible.”

and

“Office 2008 for Mac is the best option for Mac users who share documents at home, work, or at school.”

The above statements are just not true.

It is my belief that the high sales rate is a result of misleading advertising.

Put it back into Office 2008 or give me a free upgrade to the next release of Office and I’ll actually believe that line.

The simplest solution is usually the best solution. If Spaces doesn’t support multiple grouped windows, don’t use multiple grouped windows!

Issue should have been better handled.

Yeah, it is actually. I would argue that the reasons are mostly self-inflicted, but it’s still a non-trivial task. If it makes you feel better, VBA support is supposed to come back in the next version (Office 2011? IDK).

http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/
http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2008/05/13/saying-hello-again-to-visual-basic/

What was said about performance has nothing to do with 30000 pixels or what so ever. Sometimes I feel like being near a singularity because word is so slow. Add a picture and then wait a few seconds before it is drawn. There a plenty of other situation, where the speed just sucks. And my documents are not even big. Just admit it, the codebase is a mess. The implementation is just bad! Making such an ugly hacked toolbar … Why not using a plane dumb window?

Bad rendering – texts are jumping back from the next side just to be not really there, where one can see them. You have to scroll up and down to make word redraw the entire area correctly. Clicking on the scrollbar doesn’t bring you to the corresponding area in the document, though the scrollbar grabber(how is this thing called?) gets moved to that place. For you microsoft people who don’t know that: there are two options in the system preferences! Clicking to the scrollbar can really mean to scroll to that place (like on windows) or really jumpt there!

And why the hell is there no VBA? Is it that hard? This is one of THE BIG REASONS to use MS office.

As I first used the I was totally shocked. How can such a big and powerful company like MS bring such crap to the market? Did anybody test this? Then the first updates came out (promising perfomance improvements, etc …) and I couldn’t install them, because the installer didn’t find my MS installation … Such things MUST NOT HAPPEN! Shame on you, really!

If openoffice wouldn’t bad so bad I’d use it. But unfortunately it’s slow, has bad rendering, bad usability. So why do I still use office 2008? Because I need to have compatibility to windows office 2003/2007. That’s the only reason …

Your team had plenty of time to re-implement plenty of Office over to Cocoa, and at least pure Carbon. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of job it was to wrap PowerPlant inside Carbon so it would compile on Intel. Sadly, such a feat is extremely impressive (and extremely time-wasting). Software Engineering 101 tells us that if we need to spend 8 months porting someone else’s (Metrowerks) product so we don’t have to rewrite ours, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!

So instead of doing the responsible thing and creating a decent product, Office sucks, and people are finally starting to give it up in favor of OpenOffice and iWork.

Way to go MS!

By 2011/2012, Apple’s Numbers will mature, OO/NeoOffice will have grown on more desktops, and Microsoft will (re-)introduce VB in Office. Don’t you guys see a problem here? You’ll on the downward slide as a result of 2008. Yes, as Apple’s market share rises and moms and dads equip those school machines with Office (“because we need it”), you’ll continue to have the “cool-boss-guy” tell the world 2008 sales are phenomena. But, your customer base will actually shrink as those new Mac users file other means of producting “office” documents on the Mac.

Here’s the only way to redeem yourself in 2011/2012. Have all those Product IDs of paid 2008 customers entire them to a completely free version of 2011/2012. Then we’ll see how sincere the Mac BU/Microsoft is about it’s Mac base. You’ll definitely re-ignite some level of true loyalty from the Mac community. Charge $129 or $349 for an upgrade and it will be Adios for good!

Over the years I have built up a library of custom Excel functions and write and use a number of VB programs having Excel as the user interface in research and teaching in veterinary science. Without these, Excel seems rather toothless and holds little thrall for me. Indeed I might as well use a free spreadsheet such as the online Google Documents for simpler spreadsheet tasks. To have to run Windows on my Mac and / or load an earlier version of Office for Mac seems such a retrograde step! A free upgrade to the next version of Office for Mac with VB support for those of us who have unwisely invested in v2008 would be the very least we should expect! I’m not saying anything new here, mainly just adding another name to the petition to MacBU to keep its promise!

(I, too, am very disappointed about the totally unexpected lack of Macro editing capacity in the new version. I have created 33 macros for use in my professional translating work, and must use an older version of Word to operate them.)

Why is it that Adobe products do no suffer the same issues??

I must totaly agree with Eliezer and nearly all the other posts here.

1. The Spaces bug makes Office 2008 unusable.

2. Noone cares who’s fault this bug is, MS Apple or whoever.

3. Spaces is perhaps the most important new feature in Leopard. So there is no question that Office 2008 must work with it perfectly.

4. If rewriting the whole Toolbox code in Cocoa is the only way to fix it,- then damn!!! just do it! You should have started to write everything in Cocoa 6 years ago. We pay a lot of money for this office suit so use it to fix this bug! We don’t care if you have not enough software engineers. Just hire more. You are the big Microsoft. So why should the Windows Office crew be much bigger then the apple crew? The point is no one cares how big the effort is to fix this bug. Just fix it and do it fast. Even freeware like Neooffice can handle spaces… It’s a shame for MS.

Sorry for being so rude. But attitude of Microsoft is just embarrassing.

The problem is that I don’t care, and neither do any of the other users of Office 2008. The fact that you have difficult software engineering problems is nothing new; all software companies have difficult software engineering problems, that’s the nature of programming. Even more so, this isn’t something you should be even discussing on a public blog. It sounds to me like you’re saying, “this is difficult, so we aren’t doing it.” Apple introduced Cocoa and Carbon almost a decade ago at this point, and even back then they had a roadmap which ended with a completely cocoa-based interface.

Microsoft has had plenty of time to work on a complete rewrite, as Adobe did a few years back. It seems that they chose not to go this route, and now they’re stuck with the bad choice of either continuing with sluggish and buggy software or committing to a multi-year rewrite process after everyone else has already adapted to the new software design. Either way, customers are unhappy and Microsoft loses out as people switch away from their software.

I am a simple end user. I don’t know what else to do besides uninstall Office 2008 and put it in the shredder. Thanks for making me miserable.