Microsoft listens to its users...sort of

[Paddy]

http://www.macworld.com/article/133393/2008/05/vba.html

The fact that VBA will reappear in oh, 3 or 4 years isn't exactly news to get all excited about.

The comments after the article are quite interesting - particularly the bit from Rob Griffiths near the end where he indicates that Microsoft's intention to abandon VBA in the next version of Office for Windows has apparently run aground. It would appear that they either haven't found an adequate replacement, or the complaints from users, many of them enterprise users with some significant dependency on VBA have had a real impact on MS.

Microsoft seems to be committing one blunder after another these days...how long will it be before they backtrack on killing off XP support/sales too?

[Xairbusdriver]

It's all a ploy to try to keep Mr. Bill in his office! They can't really be as stoopid as they are acting or can they?!

[krissel]

That will give the competition all the more time to grab customers.

More interesting comments about Mac Office:

QUOTE

From the double-edged sword department: Microsoft announced that the latest version of its Office productivity software for the Mac is selling at nearly three times the rate of its predecessor. One way of looking at this is that more people are turning to Microsoft to meet all of their word-processing and spreadsheet needs. Of course, it could just mean that more people are buying Macs and running Apple’s operating system instead of Microsoft’s.

Also be sure to read Gates long-winded sentence about Windows 7 and the comments....

http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/05/13/bi...og?mod=yahoo_hs

[Shades of Gray]

This is both good and bad news. VBA should have never been taken out. Rather, it should have been made feature parity with the existing VBA on the Windows versions (as much as possible).

But the larger issue revolves around Microsoft's announced intention last year to stop VBA after the next new office (post 2007), and switch everything to VB.net, which essentially means that putting VBA back into Mac Office is a step too late in the wrong direction.

I still think the best way to approach it is to program everything using Python (not VBA) so that it could be truly cross-platform. But I dream... as well as digress.

[Paddy]

I suspect that the howls of protest about the eventual removal of VBA on the Windows side has made MS retract that decision as well, whether or not they've made any formal announcement on it. Otherwise putting it back in on the Mac side wouldn't be worth the work entailed and would make no sense.

Of course, Microsoft making sense may be an oxymoron these days...