5 ms·

Why does Office need to be quite so complicated? It it purely to sell upgrades or are there people out there who look forward to this stuff?

AndrewDucker 15y ago
There are lots of business uses to being able to automate documents. Being able to do so in JS rather than VBA would be a bonus for companies that have a need to do so, but don't want to train people in a language that's not used anywhere else. It might also allow MS to do nifty online things.
- gospelwut 15y ago
  I guess my giant question is why didn't they make a C#-like scripting language first?
- noamsml 15y ago
  Agreed. Having used VBA in Access back in the day, I can attest that JS would be a godsend.
Joeri 15y ago
I'm looking forward to this. I've needed to embed a web app into outlook, and writing an outlook add-on to do that was an exercise in frustration. Not sure how much javascript can solve that, but I doubt it will make things worse.
recursive 15y ago
Because it's a sharepoint platform!
MichaelGG 15y ago
What else should they be doing besides improving the product? Office has millions of users. On one of the Office developers blogs, there was a mention of the accusations of "bloat". His response was something like "Do people think we just add code to Office for the sake of adding code? Features are added in response to customer demands." Sure, not every release will have compelling additions for every user, and it's possible your goals are filled by an earlier version. The last two versions (2007 and 2010) have made it vastly more usable.
Wilduck 15y ago
You would not believe what some of my co-workers have achieved in Excel and VBA. Complete scheduling systems that tie in to three databases, complicated code that analyzes metal removal. And they don't consider themselves programmers. The lack of programming knowledge mixed with VBA makes for an maintainability nightmare, but hell, they're doing a good job of Getting Things Done. I would love for Microsoft to replace VBA with a language that these people can still use, but is easier for a programmer to take over once the scope increases past the abilities of Excel. I'm not sure if javascript is that language (I think a C# derivative would be better), but it might be.

AndrewDucker 15y ago

There are lots of business uses to being able to automate documents. Being able to do so in JS rather than VBA would be a bonus for companies that have a need to do so, but don't want to train people in a language that's not used anywhere else. It might also allow MS to do nifty online things.

gospelwut 15y ago
I guess my giant question is why didn't they make a C#-like scripting language first?
noamsml 15y ago
Agreed. Having used VBA in Access back in the day, I can attest that JS would be a godsend.

Joeri 15y ago

I'm looking forward to this. I've needed to embed a web app into outlook, and writing an outlook add-on to do that was an exercise in frustration. Not sure how much javascript can solve that, but I doubt it will make things worse.

recursive 15y ago

Because it's a sharepoint platform!

MichaelGG 15y ago

What else should they be doing besides improving the product? Office has millions of users. On one of the Office developers blogs, there was a mention of the accusations of "bloat". His response was something like "Do people think we just add code to Office for the sake of adding code? Features are added in response to customer demands." Sure, not every release will have compelling additions for every user, and it's possible your goals are filled by an earlier version. The last two versions (2007 and 2010) have made it vastly more usable.

Wilduck 15y ago

You would not believe what some of my co-workers have achieved in Excel and VBA. Complete scheduling systems that tie in to three databases, complicated code that analyzes metal removal. And they don't consider themselves programmers. The lack of programming knowledge mixed with VBA makes for an maintainability nightmare, but hell, they're doing a good job of Getting Things Done. I would love for Microsoft to replace VBA with a language that these people can still use, but is easier for a programmer to take over once the scope increases past the abilities of Excel. I'm not sure if javascript is that language (I think a C# derivative would be better), but it might be.