Potentially to be downgraded to Excel 2007 VBA in Vista

[Welshbird]

Afternoon Chaps,

I've heard rumours that our IT at work might be downgraded following a merger.

So, at present I develop in Excel 2010 on a Windows 7 machine for which I am an administrator. Apparently I'll be moved to Excel 2007 on Vista with Standard user privileges.

I'm not keen on the idea (who would be!) but can anyone give me something more solid to use as an argument against this? I have read somewhere that debugging in this situation could be really difficult.

Any suggestions would really help me out here. Thanks all.

Fee

"The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea." Isak Dinesen

 

[dhulbert]

We had loads of probelms with Data pickers on 2007 when we moved upto 2010, had to go through and re-create every date field.

So logic may suggest you will have a similar problem going the other way...

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by
Douglas Adams
(1952-2001)

 

[strongm]

It depends ...

Excel 2010 has additional statistical maths functions in comparison to 2007 (so if you use any of the new ones you'll be out of luck going back to 2007), and they improved their accuracy; go back to Excel 2007 and you may lose some accuracy.

And you'll lose the ability to use Slicers (essentially advanced pivot tables) and the Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel add-in. You can also say goodbye to sparklines (the ability to have a chart in a cell)

And Solver gets downgraded.

No customising the ribbon, either. You'll be limited to the quick access toolbar

Of course it may be that neither you nor any of the other Excel users actually use any of these features, so it won't matter

But this last one is unavoidable: Microsoft spent a lot of time optimising performance (including that of VBA) for Excel 2010. So if you revert to Excel 2007 things'll likely be slower, I'm afraid

 

[macropod]

Actually, you can customize the Office 2007 ribbons - it's just a whole lot more work and not something an ordinary user can do.

Cheers
Paul Edstein
[MS MVP - Word]

 

[strongm]

<sigh>

Yes, I know, but not through VBA* and not through any built-in tool.

You have to churn out some XML to define your custon UI (so learn XML) that has to be 100% compliant with the relevant XML schema or it won't work), manually merge it in to a macro-enabled copy of your document (which involves renaming of your document at least twice), manually modify the .rels file to ensure that your custom UI XML is recognised, and implement relevant callback functions in your VBA (possibly the easiest bit). Frankly these are hacks.

Oh, or learn .NET and VSTO.

*OK, not quite true. There are some tricks that allow us to add our own VBA macros to a custom ribbon via VBA itself and without writing XML - but again they are hacks, and limited.