Sunday, January 10, 2016

Office 2016, Sandboxing, and VBA Code

Ron de Bruin:

In Windows Excel 97-2016 and in Mac Excel 2011 you can open files or save files where you want in almost every folder on your system without warnings or requests for permission. But in Mac Office 2016 Microsoft have to deal with Apple’s sandbox requirements. When you use VBA in Mac Excel 2016 that Save or Open files you will notice that it is possible that it will ask you permission to access the file or folder (Grant File Access Prompt), this is because of Apple’s sandbox requirements. This means that when you want to save/open files or check if it exists with VBA code the first time you will be prompted to allow access on the first attempt to access such a folder or file.

He recommends putting your documents in the Library folder:

There are a few places on your Mac that you can use to avoid the prompts and let your code do what it needs to do without user interaction. But these folders are not in a place that a user can easily find so below are some steps that I hope to make it easier for you to access the folder manual if you want.

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So Microsoft is using the sandbox despite the inconveniences, even though they don't make their apps available in the Mac App Store. Interesting choice.

[…] Office 2016’s applications are sandboxed, which means that they don’t have access to external files and settings by default and need to ask permission fr…. Thomson Reuters’ Endnote software is affected by this because it uses a plug-in for Word […]

[…] are not likely to exist unless templates had previously been installed. The reason for this is that Office 2016 apps are sandboxed and don’t have the ability to write to locations outside the ap…. Fortunately, the Office team at Microsoft has documented in the PDF document linked below where […]

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