From the Dark Side--Some Mac Users will be screwed by Microsoft Office 2008

Some Mac users who need to have complete interoperability with Microsoft's Office 2007 face a serious problem when Office 2008 for the Mac arrives late this year.

We've already written about the problems with Mac Office versions reading and writing Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) documents in Microsoft's new format, the so-called Open XML format, that is the default format. Supposedly, this translation issue for Office 2004 and v.X will be resolved by Microsoft after Office 2008 is released, a huge delay from the previous Microsoft "promise." There are already Mac translators available for Word 2007 and Excel 2007 but they are beta or fairly limited in capability. We'll only believe Microsoft when we actually see the promised fully functional translators from Microsoft.

The big problem for some is that Microsoft is dropping Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in Office 2008. No longer will Window's Office documents with VBA macros and scripts work in Office 2008 as they do in previous Office for Mac versions. This is a huge problem for some whose workflow includes those cross-platform actions. Their choice is to stick with Office 2004 which does not run natively on Intel-based Macs, develop AppleScripts which accomplish the same thing as VBA macros/scripts if they do not need Windows/Mac OS X interoperability or run the Windows version of Office 2007 using Apple's Boot Camp or virtualization software like Parallels Desktop for Mac.

Microsoft has stated that it would delay Office 2008 too much to include VBA. But if that were true, why wouldn't Microsoft simply announce a delay in providing VBA capability? Something else must be cooking. More... [Dana Baggett & Bill Fox]