Microsoft Excel

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Why not make it optional? It would also be possible to promote third party implementations if Microsoft would standardize it, and thus publish the specification. That could be a real benefit for Mac users.

Anyone know how to stop this:

It’s not the F8 key…there’s an unusual problem where the mouse selects more cells than I’m asking, it grabs random groups of three of more….even when F8 is off.

I'm a user, not engineer, and I know one other person having the same problem.  What the heck is it?  I've used Excel for years.

Thanks!

Dawn

Thanks! This clarification comes from Microsoft itself is very important to Excel developers, although it is impossible to imagine Excel without macro language and also to imagine another macro language better than the VBA and XLM together.

Despite all the talk about VBA and whether or not it will be in the next version of office, is the message

There is an interesting post over at blogs.msdn.com

Can we please please have the developers road map for Excel developers?  What technologies should we use - in the view of Microsoft.

I've been asking for more than a year - come on, it's not a lot to ask for....

so you're only screwing MAC users with existing code. nice cross platform support, microsoft. support two completely separate script technologies in excel. PC users can use one of the blessed microsoft methods, or older legacy VBA. mac users can write applescript.

can you NOT imagine a scenario where there are MACS and PCS accessing the same spreadsheet? REALLY? You can't? Seriously. NOBODY thought that would EVER HAPPEN?

>> so you're only screwing MAC users with existing code. nice cross platform support,

Do you really think that Microsoft is going to do anything that makes it easier customers to move from Windows to OS-X?  Even without these landmines, OS-X marketshare is rising quickly.  Microsoft is now in circle the wagons mode.

Why not? Office is the product. Not the Operating System.

We've solved the problem with lack of vba support on macs, and it was very easy: we got rid of the macs. Typically our mac users were pretty expensive to support, being on average less skilled and lacking in knowledge of basics like what a file is, how to search the web, etc, and additionally were routinely late to work and were relative to the rest of our staff unprofessional in demeanor. So in addition to getting rid of the macs, we got rid of the mac users.

Trust me, this methodology can clean up lots of your companies processes and deadwood employees. Give it a try!

I agree with your comment Scott.  Microsoft needs to incorporate cross compatibility with their products.  Especially if their offering the package to corporate users.

Ha.   You're a cute troll, officefan.

Office 2004 for Mac DOES support VBA.   So all Microsoft did was waste a lot of development time and money on Office 2008, because any customers who need to use spreadsheets with VBA in mixed environments will NEVER UPGRADE from Office 2004.

Dawn, try hitting the esacpe key.

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

explains why VBA was dropped from Office 2008. I can't say I agree with the decision, but it

is clear that there is solid reasoning

behind it.

What "solid reasoning"? One of the biggest software companies in the world doesn't have the resources to port Mac VBA from PowerPC to Intel? That's nuts! Windows VBA is on Intel, so they should be pretty much there, right? This is totally a marketing move to drive people to Windows. I can't see any chance at all that this has to do with developer resources.

Paul, you need to consider that Mac Office sales are nowhere close to Windows Office sales. The way Mac Office can keep up is borrow broadly from Windows Office development. A port of VBA to Intel Mac OS is not something they can borrow, hence the lack of resources.

And they added some exclusive eye candy for Mac users, credit them that.

Paul, if you read the article that mjb linked to *thoroughly*, you will see that it really isn't a simple case of picking up the Windows VBA code and using that. The Windows code is in a slightly different assembler dialect than that understood by the assembler for Intel Mac, for starters. That's not too hard, but the Application Binary Interface is different. That means that the set of registers that are reserved for a routine, and when they have to be saved and restored, are different between the two platforms, and the way parameters are passed is different, and exception handling (which may be important) is most assuredly different.

Keeping the VBA feature would also mean keeping the existing PowerPC support running, as Mac Office 2008 is supported on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. I think Office 2008 moved entirely to Mach rather than CFM format even on PPC, to help with porting, so the old PPC code would need to be modified for the new format. Then the PowerPC and new Intel code would have to be made bug-compatible (which I would not expect independently developed implementations to be, in general) so that a user's macros don't break when they move from a PowerMac to an Intel Mac. We'll leave aside the issue that the PowerPC version is a JIT-compiler while the Windows version is an interpreter!

Just because you have lots of money doesn't mean you can actually spend it. At the same time, Rick Schaut (at http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2006/08/09/693499.aspx) mentioned they had funding in the budget to bring in more developers but were unable to find suitable candidates. Hard to assign work to non-existent employees.

There's been some discussion on this thread on Slashdot, ( updated ) which started from this article

There's been some discussion on this thread on Slashdot, ( updated ) which started from this article

In regards to VBA support in Office 2008, I was just remember the lack of Intel support for Adobe Shockwave. Shockwave doesn't have an Universal Binary and they tell you to launch Safari in Rosetta mode in order to use the PPC Shockwave. It occurs to me that couldn't you do the same for VBA in Office 2008?

Couldn't you tack on the existing PPC VBA implementation from Office 2004 onto Office 2008? When an Office document contains Macros instead of asking  to delete them or opening without them, give the option to open the document in Rosetta. Some option in the preferences to automatically open all Macro documents in Rosetta would be even better. I'm not much of a programmer, but I thought Apple said in Universal Binaries it is possible to preface code so that some of it only works with specific architectures so you can preface the VBA code as PPC only while maintaining Office as a Universal Binary. Granted there has probably been quite a few code changes from Office 2004 to Office 2008, but surely moving the existing PPC VBA and allowing it to run when Office 2008 is started up in Rosetta is less work than making it Universal.

Obviously this is not an ideal solution seeing that it will largely discount the Universal nature of Office 2008, but I think some performance hit is a sacrifice most people are willing to make if it means VBA is included, and non-Macro documents can still open Office in Intel mode on Intel Macs. In terms of financial cost, I think that implementing this should be able to pay for itself by selling Office 2008 to people who would have otherwise remained on Office 2004. The preferred distribution of this feature would be a free major patch to say version 12.1. To make it more financially viable, I guess it would be acceptable if the patch is only available for Standard Edition and Special Media Edition users assuming that Macros are most common to businesses which would probably be using Standard Edition rather than Home and Student Edition.

This is good news for me and my colleagues at work.

Thanks to the MS Excel team.

According with Kevin Boske, Microsoft VSTA Program Manager, "there's been some discussion on

VBA really needs to be added back into the Mac version.

We use both Macs and Windows PCs, and the prospect of losing VBA is unthinkable. So, we can't upgrade to the new version of Mac Office... but that also means that our Mac users can't handle docx files.

Presently, our plan is to not upgrade Office at all for any of our machines until the situation is resolved.

I don't have a Mac. I've only used Windows versions of Excel. But I can think of several questions I'd have if I did use Macs.

1. What happens to user-defined functions (udfs) written in VBA?

2. Did Mac versions of Office provide XLM macros at any time? Do they still?

3. It's the debugging hooks into Excel provided by the Visual Basic Editor (VBE) that, along with udfs, are the main advantage of the VBE. Windows versions of Excel can be automated by many different scripting languages (WSH languages, Perl, Python, Ruby, Rexx to name some), but there's no way to write udfs for Excel in those languages. Can one use AppleScript to write udfs for Excel 2008?

4. Can one use other scripting languages to automate Excel 2008? More generally, does OS X provide an automation facility similar to Windows? Possibly CORBA?

I was just about to order Office 2008 when (fortunately!) I noticed on the same Google output page someone's blog note that Excel VBA is not supported.  Since we recently started operating in a dual-OS (XP, OS X) environment and most of our sheets use VBA macros, I ordered Office 2004 instead.

Naturally, we will be looking to emigrate to a non-MS spreadsheet product over the next year or two.

It is interesting to see that some people think MS should let competing platforms dictate the implementation of technology in MS products. The Office products have always been lacking on the Mac compared with the Windows based PC. I am not sure it is as much a strategy as it is priorities. I hope the developers of MS Office spend at least 95% of their development effort on the windows platform.  God knows how much belly aching they will hear if the day comes that Office works better in a Mac than in a Windows PC.

Just a (gentle) reminder to 'Hansolo' that the first version of Excel on the mac preceded a Windows version by a couple of years.  Nevertheless there is no such thing as entitlement to a feature upgrade, I guess.  In any case, it seems that the Mac Office developer team takes the most Windows code and ports it to the Mac - it is a different business unit.

However, I must say that (as a Mac User and a VBA user) I found this development somewhat disturbing.  VBA use is strongest in business settings, and I am sure this applies also to the Mac platform.  In effect, some of those corporate users could resist upgrading to Mac Office 08, and this in turn might affect sales.  Hopefully not enough to kill Mac Office.  Key words being 'could' and 'might.

We will have to sit and wait to gauge how removing the VBA will affect sales of Mac Office in the future.

The bigger question I have re: long-term VBA support in office is...

What's going to happen when Office moves to 64-bit native?  Since VBA is steeped in COM and there ain't no 64-bit COM, when Excel64 is (eventually) released, VBA will sort of HAVE to go away, right?  So long as its a 32-bit program that can run in 32-bit emulation mode its fine, but as soon as Excel goes 64-bit to support 1 billion more cells and gigs more RAM, isn't it going to be time to say bye-bye to good ol'd VBA...?

From several discussions I recently had with Enterprise Architects from various big enterprises over

From several discussions I recently had with Enterprise Architects from various big enterprises over

Fortunately my distaste for dot-notation languages kept me from ever learning VBA and I continued to use XLM. So all of *my* macros will work fine in "2008". :-)

But I've also been porting my macros to AppleScript because I only fire up an Office app once a year or less, so I no longer really care about any MS apps for the Mac, but that's just me. (I migrated from an Excel develooper to a Web developer, so I'm usually writing Perl code.)

Let's clarify one thing about MS-Office for Mac. It represents < 10% of Microsoft's Office product shipments, yet it accounts for over 25% of the money Microsoft makes on Office products.

Why? EVERY COPY OF MS-OFFICE FOR MAC SELLS AT RETAIL. There are NO Bundles. No Freebees.

Short changing the Mac users is an attempt by someone at Microsoft to remove Apple as a viable Enterprise platform since it can't share VBA enabled documents with MS-Office for Windows.

Great Move!

BTW - I want to commend the Mac Business Unit developers and management for getting out an Intel Native version as quickly as they did. However, that said, it is too much eye candy and not enough substance for the Enterprise user. The "average" home user won't even care, but corporations will not even consider purchasing MS-Office 2008.

Microsoft's reason for dropping VBA from Office 2008 for Mac is on the face of it justifiable. It would be an even stronger argument if they had also decided to drop it in Office for Windows when re-writing it for a 64Bit Windows future.

However this blog update shows that they are not going to drop it and therefore if they can manage to move it to 64bit Windows they could and should equally move it to a new version of Mac Office.

If it helped I would be more than willing to sacrifice PowerPC compatibility.

As things stand even though our company is 100% Mac based, and even though we are only a modestly sized company, Microsoft are going to lose tens of thousands of dollars in upgrade sales from us alone since we will be forced to stick with Office 2004.

If they are not going to provide true cross-platform compatibility with Office for Mac then they might as well discontinue it completely and put us out of our misery (the product sucks big time anyway).

I have been using Microsoft Word for Macintosh since version 1.0. Every time there has been an upgrade to this product, I have purchased it.

Word 5.1a was a revolutionary product. It was the first time I had seen a product with the "Microsoft toolbar." Macworld Magazine used to joke that in 10 years, the whole screen would be filled with toolbars.

But Word 2004 is wonderful. It has cite-while-you-write with Endnote -- the best thing ever for academic writers. It has the best toolbar interface ever made. I tried Apple's Pages briefly, but I hate its ugly, big toolbar that's built into the window.

So naturally I was excited to see that finally, an Intel-version of Word was coming out for Mac. But after trying it -- it seems as though they pretty much just copied Pages. And I really don't like Pages.

This reminds me of those Burger King commercials where Burger King decides not to offer the Whopper anymore. Except Burger King just did that for one day.

But Microsoft not offering Word anymore? I mean, whatever this crap is, it's NOT Word. Everything that made Word special for the last 15+ years... gone. VBA, gone. Toolbars, gone. Now it's just a clone of Apple's Pages... so you might as well just buy Pages.

This is truly a sad day in computing. I want to shoot myself in the head. What the hell is wrong with you, Microsoft?????

However, VBA is NOT supported by Excel Services in SharePoint. That means if you want to implement server-side Office applications you must forget about VBA. Why this important exception has not been mentioned in the original posting?

@Boris: Excel Services never supported VBA and Excel Services is not Excel (duh!). What exception are you talking about?

I'm no whiz when it comes to VBA.  I use many worksheets made by PC users for my business.  I've used Microsoft X for a long while now and recently bought a new Intel Mac.  In the near future I will probably put to rest my older macs and buy newer ones.  With that in mind I thought I would buy some new software, not upgrades mind you but full packages.  I bought Adobe CS3.  It works wonderfully.  Soon it's going to be tax season and I do my taxes on Excel.  I thought I would also buy MSO2008 for my new mac.  When I got it I installed it and the first document I went to open had VBA macros.  Needless to say, it wouldn't work.  I was literally beating my head against the wall when I found out VBA won't work for macs anymore. Who in their right mind would ever think that MSO2008 doesn't need to be cross platform.  As I said before, I'm no whiz.  I can't write new macros in Applescript.  I feel like I just bought a brand new car but it has no wheels.  I can't go drive it out on the road with the other cars.  But hey!  I can still use the radio and move the windshield wipers....

> @Boris: Excel Services never supported VBA and Excel Services is not Excel (duh!). What exception are you talking about?

> @Boris: Excel Services never supported VBA and Excel Services is not Excel (duh!). What exception are you talking about?

I don't care that Excel Services is not Excel. Microsoft sells Excel Services as an alternative for server-side automation of Excel spreadsheets and that is the only factor that matters to me. If they make an EXCEPTION for what kind of spreadsheets can be used server-side, particularly workbooks with VBA are not supported, I consider it a significant limitation that deserves to be mentioned.

I don't know a lot about VBA.  All I know is the Excel spreadsheet I was trying to open used macros and I got the pop up window saying it's not supported.  After that I searched the web looking for a solution to my problem only to find that you have to rewrite the macros in Applescript.  I know nothing about scripting.  

@Boris: Excel Services never supported VBA and it was always advertised as such. Please, educate yourself: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101054571033.aspx

** warning: *THEY* are toying with  [officefan] and other "cute trolls..."

+ I imagine that [NotAnOffice08Fan] posted their comment whilst running  MSO 2k8 from a 64-bit/8GB RAM VM on an Intel 8-core 2.66GHz Box...

--+ Which is to imply the likes of...

  <<Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.4.10>>

? What is the *best* platform? safest? stablest? powerfulest?

Could the best platform for Launching EXCEL.EXE be *from* an Intel-based Macintosh VM! (i.e. Parallels or VMware Fusion)

!!!  multi-core+64-bit+8GB VMs !!!

** think about it **

if an MS-MBA decided MSO evolution of a foundation by BS developers would be quintessentially more efficient by championing a platform $implification..., MS could $ave million$!

They *could* reinvest $ome to improve the jack-of-all-mass-market WKS product.  

Jeesh...  Some Apps are only compatible in Java N x.xx.xxx.cyymmdd!  And I bet there’re some that only work on a DEC Alpha!?

If you have a Mac, think of MS-OS's as a Sandbox --What's the harm of all MS Apps requiring their own OSB (Operating-Sysand-Box)?

I can't fathome why one shouldn't embrace the $implification... IFF they bundleth a *"FREE"* MS O/S VM License with each 'Mac-line' product...  

The "Mac Followers" would be running their multi-core 64-bit/8GB RAM VM's and "PC Users" can settle for the SBO (Sysand-Box-Only) version!

(BTW, I tripped on this thread while searching for an Excel Fctn for XOR() --duodedohh MS!

-- Looks like there's nothing better than being able to write a quick VBA function)

<<wish I had 8x cores>>