Following MacWorld earlier this week, there has been some inaccurate information circulating online regarding VBA support in Office for Windows. While it’s true that VBA isn't supported in the latest version of Office for the Mac and the VBA licensing program did close to new customers last year, we have no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows. We understand that VBA is a critical capability for large numbers of our customers; accordingly, there is no plan to remove VBA...

Brian Jones writes in his blog about some new developments with the Microsoft Office binary file formats. In summary, Microsoft will make the binary format documentation available directly from its web site, removing any intermediate steps that were previously required. In addition, Microsoft will make the formats subject to its Open Specification Promise . There is also an Open Source project that Microsoft is sponsoring for a binary to Open XML conversion tool. See Brian's post for the full details...

We are pleased to announce that a new version of the Excel Viewer is now available for download . To quote the download site: " With Excel Viewer, you can open, view, and print Excel workbooks, even if you don't have Excel installed. You can also copy data from Excel Viewer to another program. However, you cannot edit data, save a workbook, or create a new workbook. This download is a replacement for Excel Viewer 97 and all previous Excel Viewer versions. "

Today's author: Steve Tullis, a program manager who works on the Excel Services team. I've received a number of questions over the past months from customers wanting to deploy Excel Spreadsheets to SharePoint, such that when a user opens the page, s/he sees Excel Services content specific to either that individual or to a group to which s/he is a member. Our recommended solution is to put your data in a data store (e.g. Analysis Services), and implement the solution described in this MSDN article...

A bit of older news but worth mentioning again for those that might be interested. The Office Developers Conference (ODC) is being held this year in San Jose, California and will take place February 10-13. To quote the site: "ODC 2008 is the premier event for Microsoft Office and SharePoint developers , bringing together architects, developers, industry technical experts, Microsoft insiders, and key partners to redefine what it means to build on the Office system."

Today's author: John Campbell, a program manager who works on the Excel Services teams. Replacing OWC Reporting with Excel Services As a Program Manager on the Excel Services team, I often field emails from people who have a thin reporting solution that is based on Office Web Components (OWC). They would like to migrate that solution to Excel Services, but aren't sure how or what the pitfalls are. In this entry I will talk about what OWC functionality Excel Services can be used to replace, some common...