upgrading from Excel 2007?

[TomBarsh]

I happily use Excel 2007 on my office computer (3-4 year old Dell with Windows 7). And on my 10 year old Sony Vaio running Windows Vista. And I happily use a lot of VBA in the process.

I just purchased a new personal laptop with Windows 10 and debating about getting Excel 2016. The reviews at the Microsoft Store website are not encouraging.

I have hundreds of workbooks (work and personal) in which I've invested probably thousands of hours. I really do not want to lose this work.

What sort of view do folks have on Excel 2016? Am I certainly going to run into difficulty?

thanks!

 

[BUGGAR]

Maybe I haven't found the right settings but they've gone all "pretty" on me. Kind of artsy in appearance; not the crisp clear visuals that engineers usually like. They have greatly expanded the symbols. Now there are thousands of symbols you won't use that you have to wade through to find that square root symbol.
Don't get Word. The spell check is so onerous that I've learned to how spell again.

 

[IDS]

Pretty well all Excel VBA should work with no changes. The only differences that I am aware of are:

[ul]
[li]Some functions such as UCase and LCase must now be preceded by VBA (but this is probably not Excel 2016 related anyway).[/li]
[li]Using worksheetfunction.Transpose on very big arrays (more than 64,000 rows) now returns a truncated array (with no warning), rather than an error (introduced in Excel 2013).[/li]
[/ul]

As for the charts, its a matter of taste, but you can set up styles for the way you want anyway.

The symbols are listed by sub-set, and the square root symbol appears when the mathematical symbols sub-set is selected, and it also returns to the last sub-set used when you re-open, so I can't see that there is an awful lot of wading required.

I haven't had any problems with the spell-check in Word.

See:

https://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/problems-with-ucase-and-lcase-in-vba/

and

https://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.c...ose-changed-behaviour-in-excel-2013-and-2016/

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[Agent666]

I've found some spreadsheets with conditional formatting interpret the formatting differently. I work in an environment where we have everything from 2007 to 2016, so I just test on multiple versions and tweak the formatting until I get a consistent approach on multiple versions.

The first point IDS noted caused a few issues on some code I had, took me a while to figure it out as you get the usual helpful error codes from Excel.

 

[TomBarsh]

thank you all for your useful comments.

I guess there is a "trial" version of the new Office on my new computer, so I can try that for a taste of things to come, see if I like them.

 

[jimstructures]

I am using MS Office 2010 at work and Office 2016 at home and they are relatively similar, except Outlook 2016. It uses a completely different method to connect to the email account and it is extremely fragile. You have to fill out a user profile and it does not seem to maintain linkage to the profile. When you lose the profile you also lose all your email and and address books. Be very careful.

Jim H / jimstructures

 

[xwb]

VBA seems to be the same. The main problems are the spreadsheets. If you use multiple views of the same spreadsheet, the normal buttons work but ActiveX buttons only work on the first instance: they don't work on the 2nd or third.

One problem I found is 2016 only ever creates one instance of excel unless you explicitly tell it to create a new instance whenever a sheet opens. This sometimes causes lockup problems and you don't know which sheet is causing it. Some sheets will be totally unresponsive, and you go round clicking on the X until something happens.

The other common problem is that it doesn't always ask you whether you wish to save or not before closing. I've had to re-enter everything twice quite a few times. Never had this problem when I was using 2003.

I'm also getting a lot more crashes and recovered sheets ever since I started using 2016.

One advantage is you can now save to PDF.