I would like to switch from MS Office...

Question

I would love to find something better than MS Office, and iWork '09 looks like it just might be the thing based on what I have seen so far. However, I have some questions that I can not seem to find the answer too.
1. What is the max number of row and col allowed in Numbers '09? (I frequently see the last row in Excel '04)
2. I do some program writing in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Does Numbers '09 have something similar where programs can be written to preform operations on data? What is it called, what programing language is it, and is it difficult to learn and use?
links to places to find the info would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Answer 1

From the perspective of someone that writes VBA all day as a job. Applescript is nothing like the DOT format your used to and takes some getting used to. It is also a bit slower than VBA if your used to working on Windoze machines in VBA.
An example.....
You cannot refer to a cell by
activesheet.cells(2,3).value=34
In applescript it would look more like this:
tell document1
tell sheet 1
tell table 1
set value of cell 3 of column 2 to 34
end tell
end tell
end tell
or it could be shortened like this:
tell table 1 of sheet 1 of workbook 1
set value of cell 3 of column 2 to 34
end tell
No dots anywhere. depending how used to dot formatting you are (common C, java, VBA, VB and many others), applescript is truly more like learning a new spoken language. (porperties and values are actually called nouns and verbs in the documentation).
I am struggling a little bit, but you might find it easier. I am rather set in my ways from work. I will say that what would have taken 80+ lines in VB or Vba to do, I accomplished in less than 30 in applescript.
You can look at my other post for an example of something I did that I have done in VBA before here: Pull Stock Prices Into Numbers
I could make it even shorter than that using a perl script, but I barely understand the script someone gave me, so I refrained from putting that in.
Jason
Message was edited by: jaxjason changed link to proper article