Saying hello (again) to Visual Basic

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?

sorry, it’s difficult to get excited about vapourware, i think i’ll stick to iWork.

@Tony Arnold: Seconded. Still far slower than Office 2007, especially at startup.

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

Awesome! It would be nice if Mac VBA emulated some of the popular COM objects used in Win VBA scripts, particularly MSXML.

GREAT news – they LISTENED!!!! Hurray!
This is good news for all power-users.

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)!

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

Just do what ever you have to do so we can get Endnote working again!

Office is dead … you guys just don’t realize it yet

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

I find it hard to get excited about (a) a feature that doesn’t exist yet, (b) even worse, a feature that existed before being ripped out of the next version, and (c) that we’ll have to pay yet again to get it back. Microsoft has developed a whole new upgrade model. What next, Adobe CS4 lacks layers and then CS5 brings them back?
Don’t bother telling me what you are going to do – I’ve listened to this from Microsoft since the mid 80’s. Instead of promising me the world and delivering Peoria, surprise me by beating my expectations. I have to admit, if you follow my advice you’ll be getting off pretty easily because my expectations are so low for MS.

I am an Essbase guru and do a lot of work with VBA-Excel. In a corporate finance environment, MS-Excel must support add-ins for PeopleSoft and Oracle (Hyperion) Essbase. These, in turn, require VBA support. Get these working and, voila, Macs will have credible pull from big corporations.

Documents delivered to me at work often have VB macros, so I need that that much compatibility.
My main use of VBA was in Excel ’98, to get a handle on how to translate the calls into Applescript. With Excel 2004, the object models diverged to such an extent that this was no longer useful. The problem remains in Office 2008. And all because the Applescript implementation is NOT RECORDABLE! Needless to say, it’s not embedable, either. The ideal would be to have the editor give you the choice of VBA or Applescript.

2 features I must have for interoperability with PC users… 2 features that would be very nice… all in Entourage.
1. Categories must sync. (can’t share “mailing list” category even with myself without it)
2. Distribution lists must sync.
Without these two changes, there is no good way to share contacts within a mixed platform environment. Please get this right this time. (Or fix it in a service pack… we won’t complain if we don’t have to wait another few years)
A. Tasks should sync. Small offices like ours won’t ever use Project… we want to use shared task lists to get small projects accomplished.
B. Side-by-side calendar viewing (like outlook).

Split MS into 2, Platforms and Apps… Apps should then target other platforms, online or off as the market and customers dictate. Apps should include .Net/CLR, Office, Exchange, SQL Server, Project, Visio etc etc. Windows can then struggle along on it’s own… Might force a better OS, a redesign or it may just wither away. The apps won’t go down with it, unless they are crud (which some are) – oh sorry i though this was the DOJ/MS forum… dreaming again.

VBA is the second ugliest thing Joel Spolsky ever made other people look at. This is kind of like amputating a gangrenous limb and then turning around and duct taping it back on. You’ve already made the unthinkably painful decision to alienate your established user base–why not justify their suffering by moving toward something better, like a cross-platform scripting language that doesn’t suck?

bringing back visual basic would be great.
Please fix the category issue in Entourage. That we can no longer sync to WM devices without losing all Outlook and Entourage categories is awful. The apple sync to iCal and datebook is worthless and bug ridden, causing duplicates in every sync.

My requirement is simple. My company has a large Excel/Mac VBA app. It’s a front-end to a mysql database, fetching and storing data over the internet. We (I) won’t wholesale recode it unless forced. We will run Office 2004. If forced to recode, it won’t be to a Microsoft product, as the risk is proven too high.
Now, maybe I missed it, but O2004 doesn’t have much by way of database support. No DAO, no ADO. I use QueryTables instead. Unfortunately, ODBC doesn’t seem to work with Insert queries. Thus, all queries are use a URL string connection through an Apache/PHP gasket.
My requirement, consequently, is preservation of QueryTables.

This is a significant announcement for anyone whose workflow depends on VBA macros on Microsoft Word, as ours does. Our priority would be to have fast and accurate VBA support for search-and-replace in Word documents (including in their endnotes or footnotes, where occasional bugs make the Word 2004 for Mac implementation troublesome for us). We use VBA macros to mark up Word documents for use elsewhere, so we tend to be searching for italic characters, placing SGML-style tags around blocks of these, and so on. We also use macros to convert footnotes to endnotes, accept changes, turn track changes off, and so on. An implementation which is faster than the Word 2004 one would be nice – it can take a quarter of an hour to run a set of such filtering operations on the text of a short academic book, and this is on a very fast computer – but the most important concerns are accuracy and correct handling of Unicode.
The charge against Microsoft on this issue wasn’t that it was doing something sinister – just that it had allowed the code of an important application, upon which people depended, to rust into a shockingly unmaintainable state. I regarded macro support as being part of Microsoft Office’s core functionality, far more important than any of the features being advertised as new in Office 2008. But for all Microsoft’s resources, it was being forced to abandon this major piece of Office’s specification due to poor design decisions made up to a decade before. This is the way the Word ends: not with a bang, but a whimper.
Cross-platform scripting seems to me a must, if only because Microsoft has far more resources to devote to VBA on Windows than on OS X. If VBA for OS X had been using any common code-base with VBA for Windows, it probably wouldn’t have been in such a mess in the run-up to its abandonment. Bringing the two together would surely (a) clarify the specification and (b) make the implementation more accurate. And we’re moving towards a more diversified computing world. Microsoft could well be offering Office for Linux, or Solaris, in 2020; there’s no reason why scripting should be implemented independently on each platform.
Microsoft Office has been lucky in that its open-source competition remains weaker than it had any right to expect. But that won’t go on indefinitely. If it’s going to survive, it needs continuing reinvestment in the fundamentals. VBA support had been shaky even before it gave way: how much else is like that? So it’s excellent news that the Mac Business Unit is revisiting this, and an important signal – I think, anyway – that Office isn’t going to be allowed to die a quiet death on OS X, the way Internet Explorer did.

In general, my #1 biggest concern for “Office 2008 Next” is feature parity with whatever the Windows OS version has … and is going to have.
#2? Feature Parity
#3? Feature Parity
This is an area that Microsoft has utterly failed in, ever since Word was ported from Mac to Windows. It goes far beyond merely VBA, as it encompasses the entire suite, including Exchange, and yes, even the absence of Access.
There’s other factors too, in terms of making the product user-friendly. The plethora of patches that now need to be applied to Office 2004 (due to the lack of a combined updater) are one example.
Another is a frustration of longtime customers is brought about by a combination of technology change and Anti-Piracy security measures: when 10.6 ships, it won’t have Rosetta emulation, so how am I expected to install Office 98 (requires OS 9 and PPC) so that it then can be detected by any later upgrade licence?
Granted, one can argue that Office 98 is “ten years old”, but because of MS’s pricing struture for new licences versus upgrades, using the old licence for an upgrade results in a $200/node cost savings. Thus, these long time faithful customers will effectively be forced to buy an entirely new Office licence – – a very expensive proposition – – or seek alternative, lower cost alternatives (eg, OpenOffice). Better start your planning now.
Finally, I’m of the opinion that the existing Office 2008 customers really have gotten the short end of the “Product Value” stick and that some version of VBA be released (when ready) to them at no charge. Alternatively, MS could announce today the upgrade price to Office 2012 for current 2008 licence holders … hopefully, it will only be a meaningful concession, such as in the $20 range.
-hh

The primary reason that I need VBA in Office, and the reason that I uninstalled office on my MBP last week & now rely on Office 2k7/Parallels is the Data Analysis tools. Not only do I frequently use them for my teaching, often they are quite handy for initial exploration in my research (I’m an Econ Prof at a Big10 Uni). The lack of the toolpak is most disappointing.
BTW, as long as you are adding it back, any hope of getting IronPython/Python support, too? 🙂

The ability to write custom functions to use in Excel, has got to be the reason for me. Having impenetrable series of cells, where one custom function that can be knocked up in 2 minutes makes the sheet cleaner, more transparent, more maintainable, etc… We do it all the time on the PC; it seems ridiculous that we can’t then share the sheets with Office 2008 Mac users!

i’ve used VBA in excel for the past four years. after the first year working in office2004, i simply gave up and worked on a windows box and an old version of office, why?
1) slow. i mean slow. i know how fast a dual G5 mac can be compared to typical intel chips. how can something that takes 10seconds on a slow wintel box take over 10minutes on a dual G5 mac? can you guess if the speed is any better on an macbook pro? right, it’s slower than the G5. how can that be? but, surprise, running excel in windows via vmware is extremely fast. somewhere, someone dropped the ball.
2) vba in office2004 is flakey. sure, it works (usually) for small quick things, but try to do anything truly interesting, either VBA crashes or excel will totally bomb. and then, more often than not, trying to re-open the file typically fails because of ‘file damage’. strangely, opening up the ‘damaged’ file on a windows machine everything is fine. what? sure, office on windows is a little fussy, but compared to office2004, it’s rock solid.
3) i do not like to tweak code moving between platforms. this is, after all, scripting written by microsoft, used only by microsoft, in a microsoft product. i have mpi fortran code that is more portable than vba. why is that?
4) why do my dialog boxes always look strange on one platform or another? why are you ‘aquafying’ dialog boxes and the like on the mac? just use the same UI forms. it’s actually less confusing to have a window-like dialog box to pop up then some quasi-aqua thing for users.
vba sucks (language/ide/performance). but w/o it, i find excel basically useless. since i only use office for excel, i didn’t ‘increase the velocity’ of sales for office2008 because it was dead on arrival. once openoffice 3 is out, hopefully they will support enough of vba so i can once again go back to the mac and drop having to run win in vmware so i can simply have a quasi-stable excel/vba platform.
bravo on planning to add vba back in. unfortunately, i don’t have high expectations if i use history as a guide.

I posted this on your blog two years ago:
“I’ve recently had some major VB Excel headaches that cannot be resolved. An excel file created in a Spanish Office v.X Excel would not run without runtime errors on an English Office 2004 install.
All the work that went into that file (many months) is now all but useless. The same file works on current PC Office installs.
The person who created the file is not happy. This person works in education and has reported that more and more training courses for teachers are offering Linux training. We are talking about a region with 7,000,000 inhabitants. Other regions have already implemented Linux solutions and are looking to phase out Microsoft Office completely.
Microsoft needs to understand that users want/need seamless compatibility between platforms. This latest decision only helps to swing the balance in favour of open standards and software solutions that support them.”
I posted that because absolutely NOBODY at Microsoft or in the official Google Groups (MVPs) could figure out what the issue was. All our pleas for helpwent nowhere. We lost months of work due to a problem created by Microsoft (MacBU should have had more feelers out to pick these issues up). The issue was possibly someone screwing up on the localisation. And there lies the rub. Foreign users of Mac Office must make do with whatever they get (however little) and like it or lump it. An Excel file heavily laden with VBA created in one version of Office for Mac wouldn’t run in another version of Office for Mac but WOULD run in different versions of Office for Windows. That is NOT a situation that inspires confidence.
If you would like another example of how foreign Office mac users suffer at the hands of the MacBU please take a moment to read this page at macintouch:
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/macmarginalization/topic4061.html
and give us a decent answer as to why a Catalan dictionary was never made available in Office for Mac. As I said in the original post two years ago, we are talking about an area with a population of over 7,000,000 inhabitants. The school the person worked for is now mainly Linux and Windows is being discouraged.
If I sound angry it’s because I am.
When VBA returns it must function across different versions/localisations of Mac Office and, of course, be operable on Windows. Feature parity must be a priority and you should establish liason officers in countries that have localised version of mac Office so users/groups can channel issues back to the MacBU while using their own language. As open source efforts continue to improve Office alternatives you should note that you really have a race against time on your hands, and in two or three years your user base may have dwindled significantly as a result of the issues I have raised.
Perhaps, slightly off topic but the background info is important. Thanks for your time.
BTW,as you are responding to posts, the Catalan dictionary issue (although off topic) requires a response here as otherwise it gets swept under the carpet so to speak.

“there are NO FUNCTIONS in Excel in Office 2008”
This isn’t actually true. The old XLM macros are back!
You can find on Microsoft’s web site (sorry, don’t have a link handy) an alphabetized reference for XLM macro commands. Unfortunately, that’s about it. Good luck if you’ve never used XLM before.
Which brings me to my main point: I agree whole-heartedly with those who have pointed out that a critical failure with respect to removal of VBA was the sudden disappearance of custom functions in Excel. Cross-compatibility across OS platforms is a close second, I agree. After all, one of the big reasons to use Mac Office is to be compatible with Windows Office.
But other than that, Applescript appears to me to be a reasonable, non-portable substitute for automation tasks. What it _doesn’t_ do is provide for custom functions. Applescript can only control an application; it can’t extend it.
I think XLM is an unfortunate choice for a replacement of that feature, but if it’s going to be a replacement, then the Mac BU needs to get off their butts, dust off the old XML docs, and include those with Mac Excel 2008. It’s insulting to remove critical functionality like that and then provide no real aid to users who want to use the only alternative available.
And while I’m at it, another major loss with the removal of VBA is all those great add-ins (heavily based on, of course, providing additional functions for spreadsheets, but also on doing other algorithmic tasks). Again, these things could have been provided via XLM, but were ignored by the Mac BU.
I’m fortunate, as I was able to take advantage of a heavily discounted price for Mac Office 2008. I have to say, if I’d paid anywhere near full retail for it, it would have been returned by now. Between the fact that Entourage is lame, Excel is missing a huge swath of what makes it so powerful, and none of the applications have really enjoyed the UI make-over that Office 2007 for Windows did (granted, I’m sure some Mac hard-cores are happy about that 🙂 ), there’s really very little in Office 2008 that makes me want to use it.

My condolences on your being tasked with adding VBA back in. My BIASED opinion is that there are better tools out there for writing custom apps than using Excel as a database…

I need a macro to do:
Edit -> Paste Special -> Unformatted Text
and
A key combination to automatically type a date.

I use Office 2007 at work, and a Mac Office 2008 at home. my feature requests:
– more consistency in formatting between 2007 and 2008. Sadly, even my basic CV .docx doesn’t convert correctly between the Mac and Windows versions of Office.
– the same “theme” support that Office 2007 has–font themes, and most importantly, colour themes. The colours in my Office 2007 .xlsx files never come across correctly (most come across as grey), and it is the cause of much pain and cursing 🙁
– the gallery elements animate too slowly. I actually find myself clicking on “charts” and waiting for it to finish animating so i can choose an option on the right-hand side of the list..
thanks!
-b

For me the ability in Excel to add a custom function that can call a native C shared library is vital. There is currently no way of doing that in Office 2008. Alternatively you could offer me a native plugin SDK for the Mac, like there is for Windows.

As an operations research analyst, first in the military and now in civilian academia, I’ve made extensive use of VBA in Excel. In fact, I consider VBA and Excel combined to be the shining MS product. About 5 years ago I moved to the MAC and wished I had made the move 20 years ago. Anyway the lack of VBA in the MAC is a huge mistake.
I actually teach a course in Industrial Engineering focused on building applications in VBA. Most MBA programs involve spreadsheet-based courses. With few exceptions, the use of VBA is a big part of these courses.
I am now one of those that run both 2004 and 2008 on the same machine, and the new Excel in the Parallels environment.
The MAC version MUST be as good as the PC version. Any lessening of the product, such as the decision made for the MAC 2008 will for good reason support the conspiracy theory, which you denied, but I can’t help but believe holds some truth to it.
Bottom line: Return FULL functionality to the MAC office suite. For VBA in Excel, that includes support and the intellisence capabilities.

I’d really like to see an add-in infrastructure that would allow 3rd parties to develop for Mac Office so we Mac folks can use Xobni, or other useful tools that the Windows folks have.

Hans wrote: “Please bring the VBA IDE in MacWord to the quality it has in WinWord.”
Yes, and please add mouse wheel scrolling to the IDE code window, while you’re on it.

WHO REALLY CARES ABOUT VBA? Get a real scripting language to use.
Here’s an idea. How about porting Outlook to run on OS-X? What an amazing idea if I may say so myself. Entourage is a pos.
Get with it MacBU! Give us the real apps: OUTLOOK with TLS/SSL
Entourage is crap.

I am only thirteen, yet even I use VBA scripting! I use it to create a new journal entry by virtually hitting return, inserting a date that won’t change, and hitting return again. I execute this script by hitting the keystroke Option-F7. It comes in handy. I don’t want to have to have to use Automator’s Watch Me Do function to replicate VBA the VBA script macro recording function in Office 2008 for Mac. So, if you could publish an update to Office ’08 as soon as you finish porting VBA scripting to Xcode, that would be great. It would also be nice if you could make it so that the the little bar under the toolbar woul slide under the toolbar when not in use. Then, when you mouse over to the toolbar, it would slide out. It would act kind of like the Dock and the menu bar do when you are in Quick Look’sfull screen mode. Plus, you could make it a normal toolbar. Everything counts for user-friendliness. Thanks.