Visual Basic Support in Mac 2016

Office 2011 and Office 2016 are able to coexist, so its possible to run Outlook 2016 while being able to continue using Excel 2011.

That will not help me.

I was forced to move to 2016 due to outlook crashes.

I have 5 projects to be presented to our director in two weeks.

I have to fix one issue and add new features.

I don't see option to search the macro, add watch or stack trace.

No one but Microsoft gets away with these kind of mistakes. Even worse they seem to become trends in the industry.

Now I have to use vmware and my windows 7 not 8 or 10.

This is really bad.

After having used Excel 2004 for all my spreadsheet and plotting needs for the last 10 years (because it works), I finally jumped into Office 2016 a few weeks ago because it was becoming apparent to me that 10.6.8 was finally being left behind for many important applications.  I had assumed that with Office 2016 being out for over a year, that it would be reasonably mature and not lacking any major features.  So I was very confused when I jumped into VBA yesterday to edit a macro and found basically a text editor in front of me.  I'm totally amazed that VBA is essentially MIA with no promised arrival date.  As someone else said, why isn't Microsoft throwing all its resources at making 2016 at least have feature parity with prior versions of office.  While "patiently" waiting, I guess I'll have to reinstall Office 2011 so I can tweak VBA code...

Thanks Jim.  I agree with your perspective.  I will keep this positive as much as possible --not really even all that sporting to critique the Mac version which has such obvious shortcomings.

I'm using both Office versions on my Mac.  The Windows version is running under Parallels.  The only Mac-native program I use routinely is Outlook, which is at least adequate.

It sounds like the top priority for Microsoft should be to get VBA working on the Mac version, but they are acting very resource-constrained in getting this done --focusing on O365 etc.  I can't understand the mindset of not developing aggressively for the Mac platform which has generally been growing in market share and which is disproportionately used by students and a population of high end professional users for whom hardware cost is not a barrier.

A second priority for Microsoft should be cleaning up obvious UI shortcomings and bugginess in really basic tasks.  One example is ability to insert and resize pictures in Outlook emails.  This is a "many times a day" task that barely works in Outlook 2016 for OS X.

One thing that I have always wished for (and which keeps me in the PC version) is the brilliant shortcut key user interface in the Windows versions of the programs.  Why has Microsoft missed the chance to build something like this into the Mac version?  It is a true competitive advantage of Office for Windows IMO.

 I'm referring to the ability to execute any Office command with a combination of Alt-keys and also the ability to populate and execute dialog boxes with keystrokes only.  What I find particularly compelling about this is that you don't need to memorize the keystrokes like you do in any Mac program and particularly in Office for Mac.  Memorization happens naturally from looking at the prompts (e.g. In Excel, you type the Alt-key and immediately see than "M" takes you to the Formula tab and "N" selects the Name Manager in Excel.  After doing this about 5 times, you naturally memorize the keystrokes, and you can perform tasks much faster than by using a mouse to select things on the ribbon.  I would go so far to say that shortcuts and ability to fly through tasks in their software is the one area where Microsoft has built a superior user interface.  However, this has always been a Windows-only feature that is one reason nobody gets that attached to Office for Mac.  I could no more give up working with these shortcuts than I could go back to working entirely in a command line environment.