Visual Basic Support in Mac 2016

Good news !!!

Excel for Mac V15.40 has an improved VBA editor.

Here what the what's new section says

mproved Visual Basic Editor

Create and edit macros in the Visual Basic Editor using IntelliSense, VBA menus and toolbars, debug tools, an object browser and more.

Hope that helps

Cheers

JC

Sadly, LibreOffice has bone headed management, as well. Their implementation of VBA is even more crippled than the Microsoft Office for Mac version. LibreOffice refuses to support AutoOpen macros (for "security reasons"), which pretty much rules out most macros that are useful. VBA works only in Calc, which means that it can't do anything to automate mail merges or presentations and the like. I think the LibreOffice macro language is lame, too. Don't waste your time with it.

Of all the various software products available for the Mac I think Microsoft Office 2011 is far and away the best one to have and use.

Do you know where we could find a list of features (1) currently available in Office 2016 for Windows and (2) previously available in Office for Mac 2011 that aren't (yet) available in Office 2016 for Mac?  Those of us sitting on the bench could then wait until Office 2016 for Mac has achieved parity with its former counterpart before making the "upgrade".

Cheers

Microsoft Office is a huge thing. There are tens of thousands of features, large and small. I don't know of an inventory of all Office features. New features are added, existing features are fixed or changed, and features are lost with each new build of Office. These builds come out every few weeks in updates for the Mac and for the PC, so maintaining a list of features would be a gargantuan task.

There is one person who has devoted his time for the past couple of years to document VBA differences and come up with work-arounds for VBA on the Mac vs the PC. His 2011 site is here:

http://www.rondebruin.nl/mac.htm

When you visit Ron's site click the Mac Tips and Articles tabs for lots of helpful information. Also check his Home page and check under What's New to see even more.

The lack of menu, toolbar, QAT and Ribbon customization is expected to be remediated soon. At least that is what I gather from the hints Microsoft has been making about their plans for Office 2016 on the Mac. If you're planning to customize the Ribbon, I recommend learning about **RibbonX**. That's how I anticipate that User Interface (UI) customization will occur so that it matches Office for Windows. 

As for feature parity, I am completely disheartened. Office 2016 has been out a couple months now and still every day I learn about yet another feature that is broken or missing. Today I learned that the new Waterfall charts in Excel 2016 for Windows don't even render in Excel on the Mac.

Microsoft has poured resources into mobile devices at the expense of the desktop and it shows. The mobile apps are wonderful. The desktop app has been neglected and the gap between the Mac and Windows versions of Office has grown to be an enormous chasm. The 2016 VB Editor and Microsoft Query SQL editor are in your face failures. Conforming to Apple's "sandboxing" rules breaks so much stuff it's ridiculous. Microsoft has not given me any confidence they have the will or the ability to bridge the gap.

Thanks Jim and Phil - yes the VBA editor is in a (very) sorry state. On the one hand its tough to believe that MS could release something so non-functional (as compared to previous release)...and yet, given recent efforts, i somehow have no trouble believing it at all.

It would be nice to get some official word from Microsoft about this. I do a lot of VBA on my Mac on my commute. Is MS really expecting me to keep two versions of office on, or switch between Windows and OSX whenever i want to do something like add a module!? The old version of the VBA Editor was also very horrible (and incredibly slow) but it was at least functional.

So frustrating.