LOL!

Oh yeah, it’s MICROSOFT Office, that’s why.

Tushar, I’m glad you got that bug reported. I acutally posted about it back in June at JMT (reply #6) http://www.puremis.net/excel/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1150860446

My issue was that I couldn’t find a way to actually report it. I still haven’t received any way of signing into a Beta account to give feedback. It was, quite simply, so difficult to report a bug that I just gave up.

Interesting stuff on the rest too.

>But this is Office, man! Why do we need to tack on two more layers of complexity and frustration?

No kidding. That is truly the big question, isn’t it?

I mean most excel programmers are analysts etc… who happen to know stuff about excel and often end up power users on reporting and data management, they will never ever get visual studio installed, and that was all the beauty of VBA, being packed with the regular program they do already use.

I thought that microsoft cared about users, but obvisouly it seems that office 2007 is geared toward addin resellers ……

I can already plan a long life for office 2003 at that point

(And ditto, thanks Tushar for another great article!)

One project. That was enough to realize that I wouldn’t be doing any more programming in Word.

I wonder why the Excel designers didn’t go all the way, and make it impossible to execute a macro that’s in another workbook? Right now, you can still press a shortcut key assigned to a macro, and the macro will run, regardless of which workbook is active. And, of course, you can add a button to a sheet and assign any macro you want. So the only thing that’s changed is UI modifications are visible only when that particular workbook is active.

I guess it’s not a big deal. I’ll eventually get my head around it.

“I just didn’t know how to make it work.”

You mean you didn’t RTFM? What has frustrated me in all the RibbonX emanating from Redmond has been the almost total lack of examples suited to VBA, the assumption being that any self-respecting developer would move on to managed code. Yeah, VSTO and dot-net are great and all, I’ve read the press releases. But this is Office, man! Why do we need to tack on two more layers of complexity and frustration? Half my clients aren’t even up to Office 2003, so why should I get too excited?

“A workbook with macros (XLSM) is really treated as a document-specific add-in”

Ever do any programming in Word? This is pretty much how Word has worked since it acquired a VBA object model. A document has a certain context, which is limited to that document. A regular template has a context limited to documents based on that template (and there’s a whole load of stuff here, including changes to a template affect documents previously created using it, and the template doesn’t seem to have to be open for its code to run). Finally global templates line normal.dot have a context that applies to all documents, like an add-in or any workbook in Excel. This makes it easier for Word programming: you set the context, and you don’t have to keep track of which commandbars and menus need to be visible or hidden. But it makes it hard to get an Excel programmer’s head around it.

The noise from Redmond has been that Word’s model is what should have been used for all of Office, and they’re trying to impose it on Excel now. Which means it’s a feature, not a bug.