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The Microsoft Mac Business Unit has released Service Pack 1 for Office for Mac 2008 users. The update brings a slew of bug fixes, small changes and performance enhancements, but the real news is the accompanying announcement that the next revision of Office for Mac will bring back support for the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripting language.
VBA is a scripting language that enables you to automatic Microsoft Office applications, customize dialogs and more. Although Apple's OS X ships with its own scripting language (Applescript), those scripts won't run on a PC (Microsoft does have a guide to converting VBA scripts to AppleScript). VBA was part of Office 2004 but, due complexities in the transition from PowerPC to Intel chips, it was left out of Office 2008.
The absence of VBA in Office for Mac 2008 means that while you can swap documents between Mac and Windows, you can't swap macros and other time-saving workflow helpers with your Windows wielding cohorts.
But all that will change with the next version of Office for Mac, which will include full VBA support.
Unfortunately the service pack released today doesn't add VBA support, but you will find a number of improvements in all the applications. Aside from bug fixes and performance gains, perhaps the most notable part of the release is in Excel, which restores chart formatting options available in previous versions of Office. The compatibility dialog has also been improved to alert you to potential issues when saving your workbooks in older file formats.
Word fans will be happy to hear that the customize workspace setting in Publishing Layout view and Notebook Layout view will now be automatically applied to new documents.
Entourage and Powerpoint also receive some love, with the former including an updated set of junk mail filters for weeding out the spam.
Office 2008 SP1 can be downloaded from Microsoft (the download isn't live yet, but look for it later today) or via Microsoft Auto Update.
There's no word on when the next version of Office for Mac, with its VBA support, will be released. However, today's update is the second since Office 2008's debut in January 2008, so hopefully the Mac BU team is improving its turnaround time and you won't have to wait four years like you did for the last release.
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