In case you missed it:
We understand that VBA is a critical capability for large numbers of our customers; accordingly, there is no plan to remove VBA from future versions of Excel.
And if you want to read some 2.5 year old predictions about VBA, go revisit The Future of VBA
Not really surprising, is it? Removing VBA would be a sure way to infuriate the strongest supporters of Excel – all the people who have heavily automated workbooks that are crucial to their business, like finance forecasts… Microsoft has been known to be off target regarding pleasing its customers (Vista…), but this would be suicide for Excel, which has to be a huge cash-cow. I like to be able to choose between technologies, VBA for lightweight problems, and VSTO for heavy-lifting…
I thought this confirmation that VBA was returning to Mac was still what was on the agenda?
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-13MacBU2008PR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases
Mathias, Office is not the cash cow it was. I have heard it is down 17% as a total of MS income. OF course, it might be that overall income has increased and Office hasn’t, but MS seem to see themselves more as a provider of enterprise solutions than of desktop products nowadays. But of course, the OS is the exception, and their Achilles heel.
Isn’t that just what they did to VB6? Think of all the VB6 apps that were out there when MS discontinued support for that. Maybe they learned from that, I don’t know. It seems that the Office folks aren’t too quick to deprecate stuff (XLM), but they don’t always have the final say. If someone higher up at MS says that Excel code needs to be brought into the CLR fold, then it will be up to the Excel team to implement it – not to second guess the decision.
Their prior actions were suicide for VB6, yet the juggernaut rolls on.
You would have to believe that Microsoft diversification has resulted in Excel decline in overall percentage terms, particularly when you consider all the technology Microsoft licenses to other companies these days and new divisions like gaming.
However I doubt gross sales of Excel have dropped that much. Office and Windows are still Microsoft most important products.
Without VBA, Excel is a substandard Google Spreadsheets.
With VBA it is an application platform.
These Ubuntu £100 laptops, all run Google Spreadsheets, and with such beautiful time motion graphs, it is only a matter of time before the non-work computers, self employed and small to medium offices all skip the next upgrade. At this point VBA will be all that Excel has going for it.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pCQbetd-CptE1ZQeQk8LoNw
£100 Ubuntu laptops. You will have to point me at one of those!
@Jan
It’s been some time since I looked at the charting plug-ins available for Google Spreadsheets – clearly it is time I looked again! That is a great example of what Microsoft should have been providing us with in the years since Excel 97. Google Spreadsheets is what, 3 years old? and they are already providing this kind of thing. Whereas in the past 12 years Excel’s charting has been stagnating and, it could be argued, has even moved a few steps backwards with Excel 2007.
Pity GS is no use to corporate users. If they ever do an offline version though…whoa.
p.s. Like Bob, I’d love to get my hands on a £100 netbook!