In case you haven't heard, the next release of Microsoft's Office for the Mac will lack one major feature: support for Visual Basic (VB). This core technology is what allows one to record macros, and it works basically the same on both Windows and Mac. But the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft has discovered that porting the code to Intel would be very hard...so they decided to just drop it completely.
I think this is a really bad mistake, and wrote about why in this opinion piece for Macworld.
Isn't this actually a good thing? Most of the vulnerabilities in Word are actually caused by Visual Basic. And if they integrate better support for AppleScript whilst they're att it, so much the better.
Re. "no VB in the next version of Office for Mac ...": it may upset a few folks who've invested a lot in developing custom VB-based applications using Excel. I can see a small but possibly significant loss of market share for Office. (And just think of all the trade-press books that cover VB for Mac/Windows).
Does anyone have a feel for how well RealBasic might fill this gap?
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