Office 98 Mac Edition Offers VBA

ENT, March 4, 1998 by Thomas Sullivan

Just a few months after investing $150 million in Apple Computer Corp. (Cupertino, Calif.), Microsoft upgraded the Macintosh edition of Office 98 for the first time in 3 years.

Microsoft's Office 98 product manager, Deanna Meyer, claims the first difference users will notice is that Office 98 is more Mac-like. "We learned a big lesson from Office 4.2. Users said it wasn't Mac-like enough, so we concentrated on making 98 closer to what Mac users expect," she says.

The impetus behind tailoring Office 98 toward Macs came from user feedback. In order for Office 98 to be useful, Microsoft needed to increase its ease of use the same way the company has continually done with Wintel versions of the suite. "We realized that Office 4.2 actually has more than 30 per cent of the features we kept receiving requests for," says Meyer. The fact that people wanted but were unaware of so many features demonstrates that Office 4.2 wasn't easy enough to use.

In addition to making Office 98 more Mac-like, Microsoft also made it more Windows-like by adding Visual Basic Applications Edition (VBA), one of the key ingredients of Office 97 for the PC. A subset of Visual Basic, VBA is a separate macro language enabling all three Office 98 applications to speak the same language. These three applications, which also host VBA, are PowerPoint, Word and Excel.

VBA gives developers a platform for creating Office-based solutions on the Mac. With VBA, users can modify Office and other VBA-enabled products to fit specific needs, such as creating macros. Users can develop such solutions to specifically target the Macintosh platform and also build applications that run on the Macintosh as well as Windows 95 and Windows NT platforms.

The real trick for VBA, however, may lie not in the ability to enable applications in the same suite to communicate with each other, but in the conversion between multiple platforms. Many companies operate in a cross-platform environment, and often Macs are the minority, so this ability is a necessity.

The integrated development environment provides an enhanced editor with support for conditional compilation and automatic syntax checking, a new object browser, enhanced debugging tools, and improved code security features. A rich forms package enables developers to create user interfaces and custom dialog boxes. Also, VBA is designed to respond to events in an application, such as opening a document, giving developers the opportunity to create interactive solutions.

Meyer says there are few compatibility issues, though. In the more Windows-focused aspects there are differences in VBA between the two platforms. For instance, object libraries that are not available for Macintosh, such as ODBC direct and data access objects, will cause problems. But these libraries can use Excel ODBC protocols to connect to a SQL server. "For all practical purposes, the majority of the behavior patterns will be the same across platforms," says Meyers.

RELATED ARTICLE: Features: Microsoft's Office 98 Macintosh Edition

* Tight integration with the Mac OS

* QuickTime Support

* Macintosh Drag and Drop

* Word 5.1 Menu Option

* OfficeArt

* Letter Wizard

* Internet Assistants

* Web Toolbar

* Save as HTML

* Internet Explorer

* Cross-platform coexistence

* Outlook Express

* Excel Range Finder