Mac Office 2008 Development- AppleScript vs. VBA

Question

I'm looking for some advice from anyone who has experience writing addons for PowerPoint on both Windows and Mac machines.

We have a Windows Office 2007 addon (.NET) that we'd like to port to the Mac.

Thus, in PowerPoint 2008 for the Mac, we require the following functionality:

• Ribbon/Fluent extensibility
• Custom Task Panes
• Read/write custom document properties
• Save slides as images
• Read text and shape information from slides
• Get notification of the following PowerPoint application events; `SlideSelectionChanged`, `PresentationClose` and `AfterPresentationOpen`.

I am hoping someone with experience writing Office addons for Windows and Mac, can advise.

Answer 1

This doesn't solve your problem if you need to specifically do this in 2008, but Office 2011 is coming and it brings back VBA. Spending the effort to convert your stuff to AppleScript might be a lot of work for little return where you could wait for Office 2011 which brings the Ribbon to Mac Office as well as VBA...

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9085678/Microsoft_will_bring_back_macros_to_Mac_Office_in_2011