(See Macworld of the complete article…)

Macworld | Microsoft to bring back Visual Basic in Office for Mac

In summary, Microsoft will be adding VBA support back into Office, but the next version of the office suite (“VBA will return to the next full upgrade to the Mac version of Office”).

Wait a second, the next version of the office suite. Not a service pack, so we will have to wait until somewhere around 2010 – 2011 before we can use VBA on the Macintosh again.

First of all, the lack of VBA can seriously hamper interoperability between the Windows version & Macintosh version of Office. Is the finance dept really going to make a second version of your spreadsheet for Macintosh users? We have enough problems with people creating Web Sites that require Active X controls, I don’t think we will be able to win the fight over spreadsheet VBA usage….

If this is Microsoft’s level of commitment to their Macintosh users then we have to question the amount of resources that they are given, and their priorities.. This entire VBA fiasco is guaranteed to have a negative effect on Mac Office’s market share….

From Fortune, March 25, 2008 (http://bigtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/03/25/microsoft-looks-to-cash-in-on-the-iphone/).

The Mac unit’s work certainly isn’t charity – it delivers millions of dollars in profit for the company with its Mac version of the Office productivity suite. Microsoft doesn’t break out exact numbers, but we can extrapolate: Gibbons said the Mac Business Unit provides about a third of the revenue for the Specialized Devices and Applications Group, which also includes Windows Embedded, Microsoft Hardware, the Automotive Business Unit and Microsoft Surface Computing; the whole group did more than $1 billion in sales last year. So it’s reasonable to guess that the Mac unit provided about $350 million – and since Gibbons said the Mac group was one of the group’s more profitable units, it’s possible that Microsoft made somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million in profit from Mac software.

Maybe it is time to start to re-evaluate the Macintosh dependency on Microsoft, after all, Pages (iWork) can open Office XML files…. Same with Numbers, and Keynote. If Excel can’t open VBA, neither can Numbers, but Numbers is significantly more stable, and about 1/3rd of the price and supported by Apple.

– Benjamin