Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Upgrade to Excel 2003

I bought Office 2003 Professional yesterday. Question was is the upgrade to Excel 2003 going to cause me the same amount of grief that the upgrade from Office 2000 to 2002(XP) did?
I still cannot listen to Vivaldi's Four Seasons without remembering the day and a half I spent listening to it on endless loop while on hold to Microsoft engineers the last time round. The only benefit was that the calls were free because I found real undocumented problems with the upgrade from 2000 to 2002(XP). If you are contemplating that upgrade then definitely email me so I can talk you through some of the issues you will potentially face. I may post some of them here later on.

Back to the current upgrade. I did some research online and found little actual reference to the upgrade in relation to Excel. Seems to be a non event.
However backward compatiability is important. I have some clients still using Excel 97.
About.com had an extensive review.

Microsoft pages
Sharepoint
Deployment
Upgrading Reference Page including links to the Office Converter Pack
Smart Documents (XML) Whitepaper
MS Excel 2003 Overview

For the techies. It would seem that the main reason for the upgrade is to support Microsoft's shift to the .NET framework. In particular the IRM and XML standards. However the XML features for both Word and Excel seems to be lacking in substance and XML schema tools at this point. As I have clients requiring XML export from Excel this is an interesting one for me.

I will post more information later on if I experience issues with the upgrade.


Posted by: Jethro | 11:17 AM |