Upgrading Add-Ins to Excel 2007 -- Compatibility & Bugs

[Anthony Berglas]

I am starting to port the Spreadsheet Detective to Excel 2007 Beta 2,
and it has been a painful experience. For the first time since Excel
95, the new version will not simply run the previous add-in.

I had in fact kept the add-in compatible with Excel 95 & and simply
called newer functions as needed depending on the detected version. It
is a credit to Microsoft that I could do that easily for all these
years, although the then new drawing objects of Excel 97 required some
ugly optimizations to work efficiently.

But no more. I suspect that my use of the old XL95 drawing object
interface to shapes is problematic, as is the XL95 workbook format
which is supposed to be readable in 2007 and is sort of...

So I used Excel 2000 to convert the spreadsheets to the newer XL97 .xls
format. Works fine in Excel 97, 2000 & 2003, but 2007 complains that
the spreadsheet is hoplessly corrupted.

I am also highly suspicious that simply installing the 2007 Beta2 has
destabalized the preivous versions of Excel on the same machine. I
know about DLL hell, but this should still not happen.

Does anyone have similar experiences? How have other add-in upgrades
gone? (And this is all before worrying about the new sizes, ribbons
etc.)

Also, does anyone have a good utility to dump the VBA code out of a
project? (It is a pity that Excel 2003 .xml does not support this.)

Regards,

Anthony

 

[Charles Williams]

I would suggest you wait for the Beta 2 Technical Refresh, which is supposed
to arrive very soon, this will fix a large number of bugs.
But even then you may face substantial rework because both the graphic layer
and EUI have been rewritten and there are a number of VBA and object model
incompatibilities.

If you install XL 2007 Beta on the same machine as previous versions there
will indeed be interactions (VBA6 runtime dll for instance).

regards
Charles
______________________
Decision Models
FastExcel 2.3 now available
Name Manager 4.0 now available
www.DecisionModels.com

 

[Anthony Berglas]

Thanks Charles,

I would have hoped that by the Beta 2 they would have run through their
huge suite of regression tests, but apparantly not.

In my case 2007 did not corrupt the earlier versions, it was just a
normal .xls corruption producing strange results -- back ups are
important!

Regards,

Anthony

 

[Guest]

Hi Anthony,

Have you had a chance to give this a try on B2TR? If you have, and are
still having problems, it'd be great if you could send me a copy of the
add-in, along with details as to what is broken so that we can take a look.
Our goal is to have backwards-compatibility for solutions so if you are
seeing breaks, we definitely want to know.

If you can include:
- the addin itself
- detailed repro steps to see the error

....we'll have someone take a look. Also - we've only got a small window to
fix bugs at this point, so timeliness is paramount here.

Thanks much,
Dan
Excel Team

 

[Guest]

In my case, B2TR refuses to open (claiming "corruption" or "virus") an .xla
that B2 would open and run (sort of), and which exhibits no problems
whatsoever in 2000, XP, or 2003

Jerry

 

[Charles Williams]

disable Norton office plugin

--
Charles
______________________
Decision Models
FastExcel 2.3 now available
Name Manager 4.0 now available
www.DecisionModels.com