Why was OLE dropped?

[Haneef Tayob]

Anyone know of reasons why OLE functionality was dropped in ArchiCad10?

OLE allowed one to have live links to other files such as documents and spreadsheets placed in Archicad/plotmaker. The workarounds have been covered in other posts, but I'm still wondering why it was dropped.

[David Larrew]

Only GS can answer that. They have yet to give me an acceptable reason.

[Rob]

I can see Apple conspiracy behind this

[Greg Kmethy]

We always tried to implement functionalities that work on both PC and Mac platform. In the past OLE was supposed to be cross-platform, but Microsoft dropped Mac support. We dropped OLE in favor of PDF - we could not afford to support both, so the question was OLE or PDF. We thought PDF was the better option.

[Rob]

could we dropped Mac in favor of OLE ??
just joking....

[Djordje]

Rob wrote:
could we dropped Mac in favor of OLE ??
just joking....

Especially as it now runs Windows ...

[__archiben]

Rob wrote:
could we dropped Mac in favor of OLE ??
just joking....

Djordje wrote:
Especially as it now runs Windows ...

easy fellas . . . don't make me come over there . . .

[Link]

Rob wrote:
could we dropped Mac in favor of OLE ??
just joking....

A rare laugh-out-loud ArchiCAD-Talk moment!

Good one.

Cheers,
Link.

[TomWaltz]

Rob wrote:
could we dropped Mac in favor of OLE ??
just joking....

Could drop Windows too, making one less Microsoft technology to support

[Anonymous]

OK, back to the discussion...

I tried to post this earlier but the website went down (or something) when I tried to submit it.

gkmethy wrote:
We always tried to implement functionalities that work on both PC and Mac platform. In the past OLE was supposed to be cross-platform, but Microsoft dropped Mac support. We dropped OLE in favor of PDF - we could not afford to support both, so the question was OLE or PDF. We thought PDF was the better option.

I find myself in agreement with this since it was always a frustration for my Mac clients to have no reasonable workaround for placing Word docs into the layouts, and PDF will work with all programs. It is unfortunate to lose the direct file link though. Would it be that hard to read the Word files directly? Many other programs do it and there must be some open source code out there for this. (OpenOffice?)