Excel 2003 v 2007

[Expiry]

We have Excel 2003 at work and some people in one department have taken an option to upgrade to 2007.

Firstly, I'm surprised that some have done it and not all, but that aside, do you think it's a good move for the whole company to upgrade?

Most of the people I work with don't know the basics of Excel, so it's not going to empower the users that much, but if it'll provide greater performance for the network then it's worth considering.

 

[Joe4]

As a programmer, I strongly encourage whatever version a company is on, that ALL users be on the same version. It just saves a whole lot of unnecessary headaches, especially with VBA code (or else certain macros may not work on the 2003 machines).

 

[sous2817]

I work for a rather large global corporation and about a year ago they did a global upgrade from 2003 to 2007. Here's my take:

For the people who don't use Excel very often, they complain about the ribbon and don't see any benefit.

For people who have a general understanding of Excel, the addition of the iferror, sumifs, countifs, remove duplicates, and some formatting is nice upgrade.

Personally, I think the reduction in file sizes from using the new file formats is great!

If you have a choice, it may be better to wait for 2010 to be released. The additions they've made to the pivot tables (and power pivot add-in), along with the =aggragate function and the 2007 additions as well seem to give the most bang for the buck.

just my $.02 at least.

 

[Joe4]

As sous2817 alluded to, whether it makes sense to do so may depend on the current needs and knowledge of your user base. For example, many people like the fact that the row numbers increased from 65,536 to over one million rows in 2007 (of course, my philosophy is that if you have that many rows, you probably should be using something than Excel anyway such as a database program). Also, the look is very different, so there is a learning curve there too. I hated the ribbon at first, mostly because it was different, but have grown accustomed to it now.

I just found that at my company, whenever we a had a "split" where users were using doing versions, there were a lot of problems if the older users were trying to open/use Excel files that were written in the newer version and took advantage of some of the new features. And in 2007, Excel actually uses different file extensions. Now, you can download a program from Microsoft that will allow the 2003 users to at least view most files created in 2007. But then that is an extra step for you, and they may not be able to edit those documents.

 

[TinaP]

As a programmer, I strongly encourage whatever version a company is on, that ALL users be on the same version. It just saves a whole lot of unnecessary headaches, especially with VBA code (or else certain macros may not work on the 2003 machines).

Amen.

I use 2007, but have to create macros for folks using 2003. At least once a week you'll find me at a vacant 2003 computer testing code. I'm also responsible for some help desk functions and it's a giant headache trying to walk a 2003 user through the menus when you're looking at the ribbon.

 

[Domski]

We've been promised an upgrade from 2003 to 2010 this summer. Thankfully they've been wise enough to skip 2007.

Being a large organisation they've decided to do the upgrade in stages over a period of 3-4 months which is going to cause chaos with people sending round workbooks that use the new features of 2010.

I might hide under my desk for that time and pretend I'm not here!!!

Still looking forward to it though!

Dom

 

[Cbrine]

My company currently is running with 2007, 2003 and at least one instance of 2000.(On a citrix server). I have one sheet that has to work on all 3 versions, WHAT A PAIN.
If you are going to ugrade, UPGRADE EVERYONE or don't do it at all.

PS-Saving to excel 2003 from 2007 doesn't always work correctly, especially with linked files.