Dealing with loss. Getting past denial!

[IanF]

Still getting to grips with Office 2008. The loss of VBA is huge and
probably affects Excel the most of the Office applications. Bemoaning
that loss isn't going to get us very far though - we just have to get
on with it.

So how do we move all our existing automation to Applescript? And how
well are we supported in doing so?

Not very well as far as I can see. Or am I missing something?

No sign of Applescript documentation on Mactopia to match that for
Office 2004. In fact all the reference materials there are still for
Office 2004 see (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/developers/
default.mspx). There are documents on how to migrate from VBA to
Applescript but that's focused on 2004 not 2008 - and the object
models of the two are different.

Has anyone sat down and documented the change in Excel's Applescript
object model from 2004 to 2008?

Seems like a gap here and maybe I'll write something up on it myself -
but just trying to find out what's out there first. Any pointers to
good sources of information?

In any case - this is only going to go so far. Not sure that
Applescript is going to be able to make up for the loss of Microsoft's
own VBA based add ins such as the Analysis packs. Anyone up for
keeping Excel 2004 alive and kicking! Sorry I was trying to get over
it - seriously!

 

[Phillip Jones]

There is nothing wrong with keeping Office2004 around along with 2008.

Actually most people would be far better off locating the Translators to
add to 2004 so That you can read and write to the new XML code.

I don't know about Leopard (X.5) because I haven't bought it yet and
supposed there are bug with it. whether 2004 would work with it but
X.4.11 VBA works just fine and dandy.

Still getting to grips with Office 2008. The loss of VBA is huge and
probably affects Excel the most of the Office applications. Bemoaning
that loss isn't going to get us very far though - we just have to get
on with it.

So how do we move all our existing automation to Applescript? And how
well are we supported in doing so?

Not very well as far as I can see. Or am I missing something?

No sign of Applescript documentation on Mactopia to match that for
Office 2004. In fact all the reference materials there are still for
Office 2004 see (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/developers/
default.mspx). There are documents on how to migrate from VBA to
Applescript but that's focused on 2004 not 2008 - and the object
models of the two are different.

Has anyone sat down and documented the change in Excel's Applescript
object model from 2004 to 2008?

Seems like a gap here and maybe I'll write something up on it myself -
but just trying to find out what's out there first. Any pointers to
good sources of information?

In any case - this is only going to go so far. Not sure that
Applescript is going to be able to make up for the loss of Microsoft's
own VBA based add ins such as the Analysis packs. Anyone up for
keeping Excel 2004 alive and kicking! Sorry I was trying to get over
it - seriously!

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[IanF]

No significant problems with Leopard and Office 2004 that I can see so
far. In fact some Leopard features (Expose, Spaces) work better in
Office 2004 than 2008.

Yes 2004 will stay around for a while on my and others hard disks, but
as with all superseded versions at some point it will be unsupported.
Until there is VBA support though (and I haven't seen anything about a
future commitment to it) it's hard to see how at least some group of
users can retire 2004. Let's hope Microsoft's support for it continues
through that period.

In any case the main thing I was looking for is where there is decent
support for Applescript on Office 2008. See the first post in the
thread.