MS Office apps - will they ever be cocoa?

S

SteveH

I'm assuming that the Microsoft Office apps are not cocoa applications
on account of the fact that nothing in my services menu works with
them, the same as Ctrl. Cmd D doesn't bring up the Dictionary 'widget'
which would be a real boon in Word.

Does anyone know if MS plans to bring out cocoa versions of it's Office
suite, and if so when?

Having just upgraded to Tiger, I've migrated from Entourage to the
native Apple apps Mail, iCal and Address Book to take advantage of
Spotlight. My feeling is that the Apple apps still leave some things to
be desired when compared to the MS apps, as do Pages and Keynote.
Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that MS deliberately handicap their
apps in terms of features when compared with their PC counterparts.
There were some nice usability features in Outlook for instance that
just don't exist in Entourage. (Contact lookup from anywhere, archive
items older than, etc).

If Apple just get their act together and add some features to Pages to
make it a fully fledged word processor I could almost banish MS from my
PowerBook - with the exception of Excel. Just to complete my
migration, does anyone know of an app that will automatically export
Entourage notes to stickies? Or is there something better than Stickies
for keeping all my notes which I can also sync with the notes on my
Palm?

Thanks in advance,
 
D

Dan Gaters

SteveH:
Does anyone know if MS plans to bring out cocoa versions of it's Office
suite, and if so when?
Click to expand...

Extremely unlikely.
Or is there something better than Stickies
for keeping all my notes
Click to expand...

There are a ton of note-keeping apps on OS X:

<http://www.versiontracker.com/php/search.php?mode=basic&action=search&str=n
ote&plt%5B%5D=macosx&x=0&y=0>
which I can also sync with the notes on my Palm?
Click to expand...

For example:

StickyBrain
<http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/11865>

DG
 
G

Gene van Troyer

I'm assuming that the Microsoft Office apps are not cocoa applications
on account of the fact that nothing in my services menu works with
them, the same as Ctrl. Cmd D doesn't bring up the Dictionary 'widget'
which would be a real boon in Word.
Click to expand...

No, they're Carbon apps and I'd think that redoing them in Cocoa is not
likely. MS would have to throw out all of the code and start from scratch.
That's a lot of code. If the examples of Nisus Writer/Nisus Express and
AppleWorks/Pages are any indication, it is very difficult (not to mention
expensive) to create fully featured application suites like MS Office in
Cocoa, so as long as Carbon continues to be compatible with OSX you can
probably expect Office Mac to stay Carbon. I don't think MS views the Mac
market as large enough to justify the capital investment it would require to
completely rewrite Office.

Gene van Troyer
 
P

Paul Berkowitz

No, they're Carbon apps and I'd think that redoing them in Cocoa is not
likely. MS would have to throw out all of the code and start from scratch.
That's a lot of code. If the examples of Nisus Writer/Nisus Express and
AppleWorks/Pages are any indication, it is very difficult (not to mention
expensive) to create fully featured application suites like MS Office in
Cocoa, so as long as Carbon continues to be compatible with OSX you can
probably expect Office Mac to stay Carbon. I don't think MS views the Mac
market as large enough to justify the capital investment it would require to
completely rewrite Office.
Click to expand...

Not to mention that Apple very strongly supports Carbon. After the first few
years of needing to push Cocoa in OS X to get it working right, they are
concentrating more on supporting Carbon now. Carbon is a full citizen of OS
X (and can still do some things that Cocoa can't). Office has millions of
lines of code, and will never be ported to Cocoa. Same for other big apps,
such as Adobe's. these are the biggest commercial Mac apps, and Apple won't
stop supporting them.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

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PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.
 
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