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Microsoft Office Update, and Visual Basic for Applications to Return
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That's because it is the same ancient software with UI enhancements. The Office code base has a long and unflattering history. Apple's transition from Classic to OS X and PPC to x86 didn't help out the team any. Hopefully things from Apple's end will stable out and Office will greatly improve in the next few releases.
And as for your UI questions, I ask when have we ever seen any UI innovation or consistency from Microsoft? Pretty much never. Sure 2007 introduce the ribbon in some apps, but they still use the same old dialogs for everything else.
It seems like SP1 has fixed the Excel 2008 error ""File error: data may have been lost."" that I got when opening a lot of spreadsheets from Excel 2007. This is definitely nice, as some of the multisheet spreadsheets I had would require clicking "OK" on like 10 or 12 of those errors.
To a large degree, I see this as 'Vaporware' annoucement from the Microsoft camp.
They know that there's a lot of Mac adoption on the consumer side ... and sales of Office 2008 indicates a lot of White Collar types that can influence the adoption of Macs into the Enterprise.
To prevent more wholesale defections away from Office into the different options (NeoOffice, iWork, etc), all MS had to do was to deliver a message that stopped these potential "lost sales" from being motivated to actively go out to look for alternatives.
Thus, their promise is to "Bring Back" VBA gives their discontent consumers a warm fuzzy that they don't need to bother look for alternatives, but merely sit back (fat dumb happy) and wait for MS to deliver...eventually.
Update that you pay for, you mean.
The clincher here is that this isn't being promised as a FREE upgrade to existing (eg, "screwed") Office 2008 customers, but as something that will come about ... um ... "eventually" in a MS Office product whose name (2010? 2012?) and shipping date haven't been even announced.
Gosh, its not like we've ever seen this sort of pattern ever before!
And they've had utterly no warning whatsoever for years, just like Adobe, right?
I might buy it...some...but that still doesn't reconcile with their business decision to not provide this as a free upgrade to existing 2008 buyers.
Overall, what I suspect is a tad more likely is that MS saw that a lot of people bought 2004 and got 2008 for $20. Personally, I routinely "skip upgrade" in this fashion on Microsoft products.
I'm a bit puzzled here: if a complete rewrite was necessary, then why would they repeat the mistake by writing in assembler again? Why not do the rewrite in a higher-level language so that the original code (at least) is hardware-insensitive portable?
And it still doesn't wash with the idea of "making good" to existing Office 2008 customers. It doesn't matter if the project takes another year or another 3 years: MS could - - if they wanted to - - alternatively announced that VBA will be a free upgrade to Office 2008. Given that the MBU is reportedly tehir most profitable division, its hard to rationalize soaking your good custoemrs while giving away cute freebies in the White Elephant-of-a-Zune division. Or even charging nothing for XP rollbacks on Vista purchases.
My overall assessment = "thumbs down", for this announcement simply illustrates that MS has the intellectual capacity of the southern end of a north-bound horse.
-hh
You can't just transition millions of lines of code instantly. I described all that was involved in the transition earlier. I'm sure not many people appreciate how hard software is to build (i.e. going from code to an executable), but trust me, it's hard. Mac OS X had lived a double life since the start. That's why it appeared easy from Apple's side.
I don't know that they're rewriting it in assembly. It may be in C. However, they still need code emitters for PCC and x86. And if they want to go 64-bit, PPC64 and x86-64. It is by no means trivial. Or they may be going with an software interpreter. I have no clue. The point is it had to be entirely rewritten. Keep in mind this feature's scale is larger than some other titles you use every day.
Because the operating system is a bigger issue than the CPU type. Mac OS X has a completely different API to Windows, so porting the Windows Office 2007 would be a significant job. The fact that Mac is on Intel would not make that job any easier.
Of course if you want to run Office 2007 on a Mac, you can do so. You simply have to use either VMWare, Parallels, Bootcamp or Crossover Office.
There is a few core and UI obstacles to overcome but i really like the idea. i have found that office 2007 is easily the best version i have used and 2008 is easily the worst. I so wish i could run 2007 without VMware Fusion native on OS X. i reckon Microsoft are just getting revenge for the PC vs. Mac adverts. the next version of office better be better!
What's Mac MS Office' 64-bit transition schedule?
What's Mac MS Office' 64-bit transition schedule -- next version?
What's Mac MS Office' 64-bit transition schedule -- next version?
Yeah, I'm down to two clicks now - one for some xml code that has flipped out over something and added underscores to formulas, and one telling me my macros are history.
Sticking with 2004 for now.
Hah! I noticed that too, but I dismissed it as me being far too cynical.
Here's hoping, anyway.
I would doubt that. They have to move to Cocoa before it can be fully 64-bit. I know Adobe has this on their roadmap but I, and I'm sure Microsoft, believes its customers will be better served with the reintroduction of VBA. Then, of course, they'll have to make VBA 64-bit!
Solution to Install Problem...
guidowenzl over on VersionTracker had this solution and it works!
try this:
delete /Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008/Microsoft Office 2008 Settings.plist
delete /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist
then start an app - put in serial number.
after that it starts the MS update again and then it should work - at least it did it for me !
Hope you all have luck too !
guidowenzl over on VersionTracker had this solution and it works!
try this:
delete /Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008/Microsoft Office 2008 Settings.plist
delete /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist
then start an app - put in serial number.
after that it starts the MS update again and then it should work - at least it did it for me !
Hope you all have luck too !
I don't understand why it was entirely rewritten yet they failed to make it any better from the bottom up. Why are so many things unchanged from Office 98 (or whatever the OS 9 version was)? Software has moved on. Use any piece of Apple software (except DVD Studio - I hate that) and you can do simple or complicated things quickly. Use some half decent 3rd party software and it's just as easy to achieve things quickly. Using Word and Excel 2004 under Leopard is like working in a timewarp. Why after being "entirely rewritten" are the 2008 apps no different, except for more pointless eye candy slapped on the top of the old tosh?
I have little understanding of programming so what would I know. In my mind, however, Office 2008 seems to have been transcoded for Intel, not re-written.
I am delighted to hear that VBA will return (when though and for how much £?) but it seems unlikely that the core code will ever lead to productive and satisfying versions of the applications. After all they are hardly likely to re-write all that entirely rewritten code again.
my copy of Office 2008 is very legal, thank you very much.
Still... SP1 rendered my LEGAL office copy totally unusable for the reason mentioned above.
Had to recover 12.0.1 from time machine.
Way to go Microsoft. Every time you do anything you cover yourself with glory (.. or ****.. that's what the spanish saying is
)Sorry, the had should have been has. Only VBA has to be entirely rewritten because it was written specifically and only for PPC. I suppose a lot of things remain unchanged from Office 98, in part, because the Mac BU is busy keeping up with all of Apple's transitions. Undoubtedly these have had a significant impact on major 3rd party products and developers (i.e. Microsoft and Adobe). Office 2008 has started transitioning to more of a Mac UI. There have also been numerous other improvements but working a code base that large is hard.
Office 2008 was not rewritten. I'm sure some portions were rewritten for the transition and others just as part of a normal development cycle. However, for the most part, it is the same code base as Office 2004. Hopefully, in the future, Microsoft will be able to optimize the Office core so we can see much needed performance improvements, and hopefully they'll transition to Cocoa so it plays better in Mac OS X.
Agreed - it seems like a logical thing for the MacBU to take under its wing, and the alternatives just aren't up to par. They're either missing certain features, or they cost money.
Granted, it's not as much of an issue now since any sensible website streams media in platform-agnostic Flash, but there are still outliers... C-SPAN, I'm looking in your direction. Yeah, they stream RealVideo as well but that's just one poison for another, arguably worse one.
Yeah, it was doing that for me too. 'mds' was taking between 50 and 141% of the processor for about 10 minutes.
For those bored of waiting for Office 2008 apps to boot up
You might lose WYSIWYG font menus, if I remember right, but now Word boots about 3x faster.
- Shut down any open Office apps.
- Run a Spotlight search for fontcachetool
- Open the search. Make a note of the path to where it is in case you decide to move it back.
- Move FontCacheTool into a folder somewhere else (maybe in Utilities?) called 'Moved from Office'.
- Restart an Office 2008 app.
- Check out the speed increase.
You might lose WYSIWYG font menus, if I remember right, but now Word boots about 3x faster.
Am I the only one who finds this kind of funny given that OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta has been released for Mac - with basic VBA support (which will be improved over time)? Is it the fact that OpenOffice.org has finally stretched the great divide between Windows, *NIX and Mac OS X, that Microsoft finally woke up and realise that they'll have to provide a level of uniform compatibility?
