VBA Returning to Office for Mac

The next version of Office for Mac will restore Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which will once again allow Mac users to apply macros created in the Windows version of Office and vice versa. The company announced the planned change along with the first service pack for Office 2008, which fixes more than 1,000 minor bugs discovered since the suite was released in Dec. 2007.

Cross-Platform Macros

VBA is a development environment and programming language embedded in Office. On the Mac, VBA’s only purpose was to support cross-platform Office macros that could be edited and run on both Windows and the Mac—Macintosh developers did not use it for any other type of application development.

Microsoft removed VBA from Office 2008 because of technical complexity associated with the Macintosh’s move to Intel-based processors. Mac VBA code is a complex mixture of C++ and PowerPC assembly code that proved difficult to move to the Intel architecture, and using the Windows VBA code was not a viable option because, although the Mac now uses the same Intel processors as Windows PCs, the software architectures of the two OSs are quite different. Because of this complexity, including VBA in Office 2008 would have caused it to slip too far past the release date of Office 2007 (the Windows version).