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November 22, 2006
The thin end of the wedge? OpenOffice.org Calc adds support for Excel VBA
A Linux.com article reports that Novell has been extending OOO Calc to support VBA for Excel. Although OOO Calc appears very similar to much of Excel functionality, one big problem is the lack of support of the Microsoft proprietary Visual Basic for Applications language. OOO has a Basic but it's so odd that I gave it the cold shoulder.
As an Excel user, you may have looked at OpenOffice.org and found that it doesn't support Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the Microsoft Office macro language. If you've spent years building hundreds of Excel macros, the fear of losing them all could keep you locked in to Office. If so, it's time to look again; Novell has taken OpenOffice.org's source code and create a version of its own that supports Excel VBA.
Will Microsoft sue Novell? Maybe not, if they have recently become chums again.
Source: Linux.com | OpenOffice.org Calc adds support for Excel VBA
Posted by Anandasim at November 22, 2006 12:31 PM
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Comments
Why would Microsoft sue Novell? Microsoft have been offering VBA licenses to ISVs for over 10 years. Presumably Novell has purchased a VBA license from Microsoft.
Posted by: mgm at November 22, 2006 03:50 PM
Interesting point. Certainly Microsoft has been offering VBA as an add-on to other vendor's products so that the vendor would not need to re-invent the wheel - just use VBA as the automation language and expose the product's object model. However, in this case, I don't think it's as simple as kludging VBA on. OOO is an open source product, so this Novell Office product would be different in having open source OOO plugged into proprietary VBA (which would not be open source). Also, instead of simply surfacing OOO Calc's objects, methods, properties and events (which I would expect to be a different object model than Excel), they would need to make wrappers over OOO Calc so that the object model would look the same.
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at November 22, 2006 05:24 PM