Office 2008's successor would "probably be in that same time frame," he said. We'll be staffing up, too," he said.Īlthough Schmucker wouldn't set a date for the next edition of Office on the Mac, he noted that Microsoft typically updates Office on the Mac about every three years. Schmucker said VBA's return was now feasible because of the time available until the next version, and because the Mac business unit would be adding developers to handle the additional work. "This was painful to some of them," he added. Microsoft consistently heard from corporate customers who wanted macros in Office on the Mac, said Schmucker. "Home users wouldn't be complaining about the lack of VBA," he said.
Schmucker acknowledged that the users affected by the removal of VBA from Office 2008 - and the ones who convinced Microsoft to rethink its decision - were almost exclusively business users who rely on the language for cross-platform macros that work not only in Office on the Mac, but on Windows as well. "What this decision to drop VB will do is prevent our company from upgrading to the next version of Office," said a user identified only as "Richard." When Schwiebert blogged about VBA's demise, his post accumulated nearly 200 comments, some from distressed users. "We knew it was going to be an issue with some people," he said. "The Mac is very aware of the pain this decision will cause," Schwiebert said then. All Mac Office users would still be stuck with the old formats, unable to share in or use the great expansion of capabilities these new file formats bring."Īs it turned out, Office 2008 for Mac launched 18 months later, delayed by Microsoft when it decided that the quality of the Office code wasn't up to par.Įven as it made the decision in 2006, Microsoft knew it would hear from users.
"Win Office 2007 and the new XML file formats will be ever more common. In the meantime, Leopard will ship and Mac Office 2004 would still be running in Rosetta," Schwiebert said in August 2006. " would mean two more years before the next version of Mac Office made its way to consumers. He also estimated that the work would take two years, which would push back the release of a Mac upgrade. At the time the decision was announced, Erik Schwiebert, the software design lead of Microsoft's Mac team, called moving VBA to Intel-based Macs "incredibly difficult."
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