Microsoft Mac BU announces impending return of Visual Basic in Office update
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
May 13, 2008 at 10:00am
Microsoft Corp.’s Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) has announced details about the success of Office 2008 for Mac and the planned return of Visual Basic.
“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,” says Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac BU at Microsoft.
The Mac BU today is releasing Service Pack 1 (SP1) that provides increased stability, security and performance enhancements to the Office 2008 suite, according to Eisler. Users also will find application-specific updates, including the following:
Microsoft Office Excel
° Compatibility. Improved compatibility with files exchanged between Excel 2008 for Mac and Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 for Windows
° Custom Error Bars. Restored formatting option on the Error Bars panel for data series
° Printing. More reliable printing for elements on Excel 2008 workbooks Microsoft Entourage
° Calendar. SEnhancements to improve calendar view and all-day reminders with reoccurrence
° Exchange Server support. Overall improvement to synchronization support, including removing attachments from Exchange Server messages and synchronizing to the server, as well as support for editing the contents of Exchange Server messages via AppleScript and synchronizing the changes to the server
° E-mail images. Ability to send and view images in Entourage from third-party tools
Microsoft Office Word
° Printing. Improved accuracy when orienting tables with cell shading
° Document map. Improved reliability and responsiveness to select items
° Notebook layout. Updated formatting, recording status and a variety of display options
Microsoft Office PowerPoint
° Printing. Improvements to eliminate crashing when printing documents to high-dpi printers and increased overall printing speed by 10 times on some large presentations
° Mobile viewing. Ability to view Mac .PPTX files on Windows Mobile phones
° AppleScript. Ability to use the PowerPoint selection object in AppleScript to implement custom scripts that operate on the current selection in PowerPoint.
Customers can download the update for free, and it will be also available from Microsoft Auto Update. What’s more, the Mac BU is providing a glimpse at the road map of Office for Mac by announcing the return of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in the next version.
The group is bringing VBA-language support back to the next version of Office for Mac. 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—the team recognizes that VBA-language support is important to a select group of customers who rely on sharing macros across platforms, Eisler says.
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dave Says:
Actually, they did mention it, and there were lots of complaints because removing VBA totally screws a large portion of users [and/or potential users], namely business users, as home users would be less likely to heavily use this feature and share the documents with Windows users.
The conspiracy theory would be that they removed this feature and replaced it with AppleScript in order to reduce Apple’s ability to sell to big business.
Posted on May 13, 2008
Erik Schwiebert Says:
We talked about the removal of VB extensively before Office 2008 came out. I put up a very long blog post about the topic in August 2006, about 14 months ahead of the street date.
Posted on May 13, 2008
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
Andrew T Says:
Cool, I know several people who were excited to get Office 2008 then wanted to return it when they found out VB was stripped out. It’s funny that nobody at MS mentioned it was taken out before the product was released for public consumption.
Posted on May 13, 2008