Showing posts with label vba. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vba. Show all posts

12 February 2007

A Doubly-Poisoned Chalice?

I'm not sure about this:

Probably most of you have heard or read about Novell's effort to provide VBA support in OpenOffice.org for better interoperability with a well known competitive office suite. On the other hand Sun has a similar VBA migration story in place for StarOffice. Sun's solution is designed as an extension which is 100% optional whereas Novell's solution prefers the integration directly in the code base. So we have two similar solutions which overlap in many areas. This is a sub-optimal situation and probably nobody would disagree here. The good news is that both companies have come to an agreement that it makes sense to share their resources and work together on one common OpenOffice.org VBA story.

First, anything to do with Novell while it is engaged in its pact with the devil seems dodgy to me; and secondly, it is well-known that VBA is essentially a toolkit for security problems. Yes, it will be possible to turn it off, but frankly, it seems a bit perverse to aim for full compatibility with even the really dangerous bits of Microsoft Office. (Via heise online.)