UGN InfoManager

The Mac BU today is releasing Service Pack 1 (SP1) that provides increased stability, security and performance enhancements to the suite. The group also is providing a glimpse at the road map of Office for Mac by announcing the return of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in the next version.

The later if really big news since a year ago, they were saying that not only were they dropping VBA on the Mac, but that they were going to eliminate it on the Windows version as well.

Office 2008 for Mac SP1 features key suitewide updates for increased stability, increased security and overall performance improvements. Users also will find application-specific updates, including the following:
Microsoft Office Excel
• Compatibility. Improved compatibility with files exchanged between Excel 2008 for Mac and Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 for Windows
• Custom Error Bars. Restored formatting option on the Error Bars panel for data series
• Printing. More reliable printing for elements on Excel 2008 workbooks
Microsoft Entourage
• Exchange Server support. Overall improvement to synchronization support, including removing attachments from Exchange Server messages and synchronizing to the server, as well as support for editing the contents of Exchange Server messages via AppleScript and synchronizing the changes to the server
• E-mail images. Ability to send and view images in Entourage from third-party tools
Microsoft Office Word
• Printing. Improved accuracy when orienting tables with cell shading

Microsoft Office PowerPoint
• Printing. Improvements to eliminate crashing when printing documents to high-dpi printers and increased overall printing speed by 10 times on some large presentations
• Mobile viewing. Ability to view Mac .PPTX files on Windows Mobile phones
• AppleScript. Ability to use the PowerPoint selection object in AppleScript to implement custom scripts that operate on the current selection in PowerPoint

Customers can download the update for free at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx, and it will be also available from Microsoft Auto Update.

VBA Returns to Future Versions of Office for Mac
The Mac BU also announced it is bringing VBA-language support back to the next version of Office for Mac. Sharing information with customers as early as possible continues to be a priority for the Mac BU to allow customers to plan for their software needs.2 Although the Mac BU increased support in Office 2008 with alternate scripting tools such as Automator and AppleScript — and also worked with MacTech Magazine to create a reference guide, available at http://www.mactech.com/vba-transition-guide — the team recognizes that VBA-language support is important to a select group of customers who rely on sharing macros across platforms. The Mac BU is always working to meet customers’ needs and already is hard at work on the next version of Office for Mac.
(OpenOffice 3.0 Beta is already starting to support VBA as an alternative to MS Office.)

More information about the Mac BU and Microsoft Macintosh products is available at http://www.microsoft.com/mac.

The complete announcement is here.

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