grrrrr

[chhotii]

So today I stumble across this item of information: In the Macintosh version of Office 2008, Visual Basic for Applications will be gone. This is kind of a big deal for us, because my boss just loves writing VBA within Excel. Not little convenience macros that one could imagine re-doing in AppleScript, but long, long, long tracts of programming, doing all the analysis he can think of to dump back into spreadsheets and graph. I am not very supportive of this habit, because I hate VBA with a passion; but still, it would be easier to just let him keep on doing what he's doing than transition away. Of course we are still on Office 2004; it seems to still meet everyone's needs for the moment, so the site license has not been upgraded, probably. But eventually we will start to run into file format incompatibility inconveniences, or something, and need to upgrade.

So when did this news come out? Almost two and a half years ago. Shit, if I had known 2.5 years ago, I could have prevented a lot of VBA code from coming into existence, which we now have to worry about. I would have had 2.5 more years to plan the transition. 2.5 years to work on trying to persuade my boss to learn Perl or something. If I had found out 2.5 years ago, perhaps there would be no transition to worry about.

If I'm going to continue to be the enabler for his Macintosh habit :) I'm going to have to stay on top of news in the Macintosh world better, to head off these bad surprises. I'm obviously not doing that effectively. Back in the old days something like MacWorld would be worth the glossy paper it was printed on, but now it's too full of irrelevant crap like 1) iPhone news, 2) iPod news, and 3) Web sites of interest to home users. I've been reading the newsletters of some Apple reseller, but obviously, they only have an interest in retelling news that will make people feel good about buying an Apple product right away, so I get only good news not bad. Not useful.

What's a good place to stay on top of Macintosh-related news-- the good, bad, and ugly? I know about Ars Technica, and I should read it more. The MacWorld website is all flashy blinky pop-up annoyance. What else?

Comments

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

mac rumors is good

and of course, he could always run office inside XP emulation...

#

[feoh.livejournal.com]

From Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/05/14/mac-bu-talks-office-2008-sp1-vbas-triumphant-comeback

The short version: VBA is coming back with SP1. They now recognize that taking it away was a bonehead move.

To be fair, for anyone who's done software dev, this was an "Do we ship Office 2008 now sans VBA and torque people off, or delay release by another 6 months and torque even MORE people off?"

Bear in mind that this release was also the Big Switch to intel native, which Mac folks were clamoring for (Running Office 2004 in Rosetta is OK but for a bread and butter app like Office, OK doesn't cut it).

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, Mac Rumors is one. Thanks!

But run Windows Excel in emulation... eww, yuck... nah, we'll just keep 2 versions of Excel (old for macros and new for format compatibility) on hand if need be.

[chhotii.livejournal.com]

Ah-hah! Thank you for this pointer.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

As feoh noted, VBA comes back shortly. Because they realized they were being stupid.

As far as Macintosh related websites, I look at the following:

Macintouch (http://www.macintouch.com/)
MacNN (http://www.macnn.com/news)
Mac Rumors (http://www.macrumors.com/)
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (http://www.tuaw.com/)

(Well, more than that, but those will do you fairly well.)