Although it will take some getting used to, it's clearly more efficient.
The Ribbon does away with almost all of this the Home tab, for example, shows most of the options previously found in the Formatting palette, without the hassle of finding somewhere on screen to keep it. Excel for Mac previously felt rather bitty, with a stack of toolbars and a slew of floating palettes required to reach all its features. Microsoft warns, however, that some VBA-dependent add-ons may still not work and we did find macros ran slightly slower than in Excel 2004.Ī more immediately obvious change is to the user interface. With the Visual Basic Editor back under the Tools > Macros menu, Excel for Mac matches the Window version's macro handling again.
Neither, however, had the power of VBA to bend Excel fully to the user's will, and porting macros between the three was a major task. Not that the 2008 edition was completely unscriptable: the old XLM macro language was still supported, as was AppleScript. Dependent on existing macro code for business processes, they had no choice but to stick with Excel 2004. For many Mac-based Excel users, Office 2008's lack of support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripting was a deal-breaker. The biggest news in Excel 2011 is that macros are back.
