While this doesn’t seem unreasonable from Microsoft’s perspective (after all, this is a small part of a much bigger thing), it makes maintaining the original comment extraction script quite difficult. The other ongoing challenge was that on Windows - where it does work - VBA for Microsoft Office is occasionally updated, often without any documentation about what exactly has changed. It seems that Microsoft’s implementation of VBA for Microsoft Office doesn’t quite work on the Mac, and there appears to be no movement towards fixing it.
I could never get it to work on the Mac despite my (and my nerdy friends’) best efforts. However, there were some problems with the technical approach.
In addition, the approach has also found some resonance with method instructors who want to encourage their social science students to dabble in a bit of code. I won’t repeat the original argument here.) To my surprise, it has been one of the most-read posts, resonating with researchers who have small budgets and simple needs. (I’d encourage you to go and read it first before you continue. About two years ago, I wrote a post here describing a simple and cheap method of coding text documents such as interviews.
