Microsoft is reintroducing VBA support for Office for Mac

Microsoft will add support for the VBA scripting language to Office for Mac again, the company announced. However, vba will not be reintroduced until the next version of Office for Mac.

The company from Redmond is tack because of the criticism it has received for the omission of vba support in the new Office 2008 for Mac OS X. This version was released in January this year. Microsoft had in August 2006 announced drop support for the old scripting language for Office applications because it is too difficult and would take too much time to port the programming language to Intel processors. The previous version of Office for Mac OS X, Office 2004, was developed for IBM’s Powerpc architecture.

A tricky point is that VBA support will only be reintroduced with a new Office version for the Mac. Since Office 2008 has only recently been released, it will not be possible to run VBA macros in a new Office version for Mac OS X until 2010 or 2011 at the earliest. For many companies with a mix of Windows and Mac machines , and who use cross-platform vba macros, it will be appropriately late. These companies can choose to continue using an old Office version or to transfer the VBA macros to, for example, Applescript or Automator, which are included in Office 2008.

Microsoft has also released Service Pack 1 for Office 2008 for Mac. Among other things, the update makes typing text in visual elements smoother, while layers in PSD files are now correctly aligned. Also, the Office uninstall tool no longer searches a Time Machine backup for versions of Office. Office 2008 SP1 is effective immediately available and is 180MB in size.