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Following MacWorld, Reg Developer started a rumor [1] that VBA would be going away from future versions of Microsoft Office for Windows. The speculation was based on Office 2008 for Mac dropping VBA (a big blunder by Microsoft, IMHO) and on Microsoft dropping their licensing program for 3rd parties to incorporate VBA into their applications.
Sometimes the internet is like a Petri dish for The Stupid Virus. Rumors grow and spread rapidly. This rumor spread wide enough that it even caused Microsoft to take notice. The Excel team at Microsoft posted a clarification [2] that VBA for the Windows based version of Office won’t be going away in the foreseeable future.
This is a good thing.
I’ve read speculation here and there about the future of VBA for a while now. Partly, this was due to the Mac 2008 VBA issue [3] and partly this was due to the huge push Microsoft is making for SharePoint services, relegating Office VBA development to the role of the red-headed stepchild. But no official word from Microsoft was issued until now. It took a widely read site like The Reg to make Microsoft stand up and take notice.
This started me thinking. What about all the other things developers wonder about?
I’d like to port FlowBreeze from VB6 to .NET, but there are still some stumbling blocks. The biggest hurdle is the lack of official support for Excel 2000. The next biggest hurdle is that COM add-ins run in the Excel process, and only one version of the .NET framework can be running in a single process space. If you develop using .NET 2.0 and the customer also uses an add-in based on .NET 1.1, then problems can occur. There are ways of dealing with these problems, but it would help if I had more information on which to base decisions.
I, and a lot of other developers, would love to know the penetration stats for the various .NET frameworks. And what about the user stats for Office 2000, XP, 2003, and 2007? Solid market data on that would be great.
Maybe The Reg can help us out. I’m sure other people could think of more data Microsoft could share to aid the developer community. Could we get a few more rumors out there?
[1] http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/01/14/office_mac_08_vba/
(See the footnote that the article has been updated. In this case, ‘updated’ means ‘completely rewritten’.)
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2008/01/16/clarification-on-vba-support.aspx
[3] http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/
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In my last post I kind of took a pot shot at Microsoft’s focus on SharePoint Services, insinuating that the internal push was driven in part by competition from Google Docs and Spreadsheets. But I don’t think that Microsoft really has much to worry about. Yeah, Google Spreadsheets are still kind of kludgey. But I’m sure they’ll improve, so that’s not the reason I say this.
The thing they’re lacking is an ecosystem like Microsoft’s. Microsoft’s applications not only allow them to make money, but they allow others to leverage off their systems to make money as well. Nowhere is that more evident than Excel. I had no idea how big the Excel ecosystem was until I developed a commercial add-in for it. But if you read the Google Docs and Spreadsheets terms of service, you’ll see that Google just doesn’t get it. Here’s an excerpt:
“Subject to the Terms, Google grants you a personal, non-transferable and non-exclusive right and license to use the object code of its Software; provided that you do not (and do not allow any third party to) copy, modify, create a derivative work of, … unless such activity is expressly permitted or required by law or has been expressly authorized by Google in writing.”
Pretty scary words for an OSCON sponsor. To be fair, I don’t think many of the OSCON sponsors truly open their source code to customers, but that’s another topic. Regardless, as a developer I stay away from things that requires me to get express permission (or a lawyer) before I can touch the keyboard.
If Google really wants to challenge Microsoft, they need to provide terms of service that allow 3rd party developers to leverage off of Google Spreadsheets. And make money doing so. There’s a lot more being done with Excel then a simple grid with graphs. I’ve seen some first class database reporting tools, dashboards, financial analysis packs, statistical packages, and many other add-ins developed in Excel. These are the sorts of things that tie users to a product.
Microsoft’s web based spreadsheet is comprised of three parts - Excel Calculation Services (the engine), Excel Web Access (the browser interface), and Excel Web Services (the API). The fact that they brand the whole package as “Excel Services” shows that they “get” it. Maybe someday, Google Spreadsheets will have a friendly license, like Google Gears does. But until they do, I just don’t think they’ll never be able to fully challenge Excel.
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It’s late Saturday night and before hitting the sack I decide to catch up on a little web reading. On a lark I went over to the MSDN blogs home page and searched for Excel. After all, I make Excel add-ins, and who better to find out the latest Excel news than from the Microsoft developers themselves, right?
Holy moley! The top 10 results by relevance are:
(The last 4 were by Dave Gainer, on the official Excel team blog.)
Other than the first link, it seems that Microsoft employees definitely have a SharePoint fixation. I realize that Excel is a mature product and there may not be that much new ground to cover, blog-wise. But you’d think with the release of Excel 2007 this year that there’d be more. Is SharePoint just shiny and new and worth talking about? Or, has Google scared the bejesus out of Microsoft, and the execs are pushing it hard internally? Either way, it’s an interesting insight to where the company is headed.
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Without much fanfare, BreezeTree Software released FlowBreeze v1.4 the other day. I’ll get to the fanfare bit later. The following is a summary of the changes.
New Features
- Apply Styles: Applies the default styles to all the flowchart symbols and lines in the drawing.
- Toggle Gridlines: By default FlowBreeze hides the gridlines. This simply lets you toggle them on/off.
- Extract Flowchart Text: Iterates through all the flowchart symbols and outputs the text to a worksheet - useful for assigning and tallying process metrics.
Changes
- The Toggle Toolbars feature has been replaced with integrated drop down menus, now with more symbols added.
- A fail-safe has been added to the toolbar loading. Occasionally Excel will hang when setting toolbar icons. If this occurs, the toolbar buttons will revert to all text. (Given all the cryptic icons out there, this is actually kind of refreshing.)
- The Smart Sizing feature has been extended to Decision shapes. Formerly, their height was set based on the text length, often producing short, squat diamonds. The new approach is to set the minimum height equal to the width for a uniform look.
Bug Fixes
- Yes.
[There were a number of fixes, most having to do with gracefully handling the changes to the Excel 2007 AutoShapes object model.]
Why No Fanfare?
The 3rd party licensing tool used by FlowBreeze has been causing a number of Vista compatibility issues. If you are running Vista and interested in trying FlowBreeze, please contact me directly and I will send you a Vista friendly version.
More to come on that issue …
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Need to create some simple web graphics? A Buy Now! button or a Download link, perhaps?
If you have Office 2007, look no further because you can create simple yet stylish graphics in just a few minutes. The new styles available for the built-in AutoShapes make it easy to drop a simple rounded rectangle, oval, circle, or arrow onto the spreadsheet and gussy it up for show and tell.
The first thing you’ll want to do is add the CopyPicture function to your personal toolbar, otherwise you stand no chance of finding it. I won’t go into how to customize your personal toolbar here, but it should be in the help file. Once that is done, creating a button just takes a few steps:
1. Click Insert from the ribbon menu.
2. Select a shape and click the worksheet and drag it to size with the left mouse button.
3. With the shape still selected, just type your text.
4. Click Format from the ribbon menu and drop down the Styles sub-menu and pick a style per your personal taste.
5. Right-click on the shape and set the font formatting as desired.
6. Click the CopyPicture icon you added to the personal toolbar and select Bitmap as the format.
7. Open Paint (or whatever image editor you have) and Paste it.
Save the image and Voila! - you’re done. Here are two samples I created:
By the way, the Download button is actually comprised of two shapes - a rounded rectangle and a down arrow, formatted separately then grouped together. It took just a few minutes to create the buttons, so if you’re graphically challenged and short on time, Excel 2007 works great in a pinch.
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FlowBreeze 2.0 gets a new Start Flowcharting prompt. The old Start Flowcharting prompt only allowed you to set the start Terminator symbol text and location. The new window makes that optional, plus it allows you to create a set the page properties, show/hide the Excel grid lines, and either create a simple grid or load a template.
For a simple grid, you can set the page properties. these can always be changed later through the standard File > Page Setup menu, but their main purpose for flow charts is to display the page breaks as a set of drawing area boundaries. Here is the screen shot:
(Click to enlarge)
Choosing the template option, you can choose from 22 different template styles in 4 different page sizes (8-1/2×11, 11×17, A3, and A4). That number will grow over time. Here is the screen shot for the Start Flowcharting window with the Load a Template option choosen:
(Click to enlarge)
When you choose to load a template, the template gets loaded into a new worksheet and (optionally) the start Terminator symbol is added containing the text you entered. Below is a screen shot of a loaded flow chart template with the start Terminator symbol added and formatted. The cursor is positioned for the next entry, waiting to convert your text entry into a flow chart symbol based on a set of rules that you can customize (screen shots for that are coming). The shaded guidelines assist you to ensure the symbols are properly aligned.
(Click to enlarge)
Again, more screen shots will be posted as they are finalized…
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As version 2.0 of FlowBreeze nears release I will preview new features. This first feature preview is the save as Picture function in the new Export tool. The Save As picture tool allows you to save just the flowchart as a picture or select both the flowchart and a range of cells. Actually, there doesn’t even need to be a flowchart on the sheet - you can save a range of cells and anything included in it if you want.
Here is a screen shot:
(Click to enlarge)
The Save Flow Chart as Picture feature will support .png, .jpg, .gif, .bmp, .tif, and .emf formats. here is a preview of an Excel flow chart saved as a .png file:
(Click to enlarge)
More previews to come…
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FlowBreeze build 1.3.42 was released today with the following fixes:
- FlowBreeze now supports symbols with over 255 characters.
- One character prefixes were being interpreted as node labels for circular Connector symbols. So, prefixes such as Q:, T:, and P: were incorrectly generating Connectors. The order of evaluation has been changed so prefixes are detected before applying other rules.
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FlowBreeze build 1.3.40 has been released. The following bugs were fixed:
- Bug: Turning off prompt for start terminator still resulted in being prompted. Fixed.
- Bug: Turning off prompt for stop terminator still resulted in being prompted. Fixed.
- Bug: Clicking Cancel on terminator prompt locked up Excel. Terminator prompt turns off Excel screen updating for faster rendering. Clicking Cancel bypassed turning the Excel screen updating back on. Fixed.
- Annoyance: New symbols added next to Decision shapes crowded the downward branch label (text box). Cursor is now positioned one more cell down.
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If you’re one of the early adopters of Excel 2007, then FlowBreeze is ready for you. The flow chart add-in for Excel is now Excel 2007 compatible. Excel now has a Ribbon replacing the classic menus and toolbars, but the FlowBreeze toolbar is still accessible under the Add-Ins tab of the Ribbon.
More info (and pictures!) will be posted soon.
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(P.S. Vista compatibility is still in process.)
