XLS Redundant?

[tmischler]

Hi all,

I have spent the last couple of years becoming familiar with (and quite attached to) MS Excel but a couple of things have happened recently:

1. On a training course for another piece of software, the trainer told us that one of the major banks was planning to eliminate MS Excel from its systems entirely within two years.

Does anyone know who this is? Whether it is true?

Basically, he went as far as blaming Worldcom on excel (which I can't say I agree with being an accountant).

2. Re. VBA, apparently MS are planning to dump the xls format and transfer everything to xml format. From what I have heard, this means that any macros we write will have to be in Java (don't have a clue) and that you will not need MS Excel to read or create these files.

Can anyone enlighten me or further elaborate? Is this true? What are the implications for all of us? Is all the excel stuff we learned about to become useless?

Edited by firefytr: Oct 6, 2005, 23:21 GMT; Reason: Please do not use any BB tags in your Subject line.

 

[tmischler]

Really sorry to bump but I figure one of you MVPs must know something about this...

 

[BrianB]

I work for a very large Telecoms company (15,000 + pcs) and we are still using Office 97 on Windows NT4 - I guess upgrades take some time to filter through.

The main reason is that upgrades of any application contain bugs and testing by our IT department before release to us mere mortals is very expensive.

Can you imagine us, then, converting all our .xls files overnight ?

I think not.

 

[tmischler]

Well I hope you're right Brian but the rumours are starting to worry me a bit!

 

[gwkenny]

.

Hi there:

1. On a training course for another piece of software, the trainer told us that one of the major banks was planning to eliminate MS Excel from its systems entirely within two years.

IF this is for retail commercial banking I can definitely understand. Canned in-house programs should provide anything a lending officer could ever want. It's probably much better that way. A lending officer making his/her own spreadsheet is probably not a good thing on the whole as the spreadsheet would be subject to too much human error. And how many lending officers have access to a quant group? Even at the Branch Manager level. The entire portfolio should already be in an in-house program and each instrument rated/graded accordingly so calcing stuff like exposure and business should be canned analysis.

This will absolutly not work for corporate/fixed income/investment banking/private equity/blah blah blah. There are financial software packages that are geared towards financial analysis, consolidation, reporting, and structuring but these are more enterprise software packages and not geared for quick and dirty analysis. Anyone in this industry knows it's not delivering the best product/services but about sufficing your client enough so they give you the business or you keep them happy enough so you keep their business. It's all about churning out more analysis/pitches and chasing leads to keep the pipeline going.

Spreadsheets are not going to die anytime soon if ever. Including Excel.

Basically, he went as far as blaming Worldcom on excel (which I can't say I agree with being an accountant).

Doesn't this raise a huge red flag on the Idiot scale? You're going to hide 11 billion dollars somewhere in a big spreadsheet? Or oops, you made a slight decimal miscalculation? This guy is an idiot among idiots.

2. Re. VBA, apparently MS are planning to dump the xls format and transfer everything to xml format. From what I have heard, this means that any macros we write will have to be in Java (don't have a clue) and that you will not need MS Excel to read or create these files.

Well, I can see some Microsoft dingy spreading rumors to such effect as XML currently really only works with IE, but VBA isn't going anywhere soon.

A huge investment has been made by Microsoft to develop VBA and to make the object models in the Apps of it's Office Suite to be much more in sync with each other ever since WordBasic.

There are so many legacy applications Microsoft can't even think about getting rid of VBA for at least several major Office versions. But before they can even go THAT far, they have to offer you an alternative. That alternative isn't even here yet so why bother even talking about VBA's deathknell?

I think the reason why nobody else has replied to your inquiries is because it's extremely far fetched.

As that goofy song says, "Don't worry, be happy."

 

[tmischler]

Well I hope the enquiry is far fetched but the sources I have would both appear to be relatively reliable and have about 60 years industry experience between the two of them.

Obviously the Worldcom thing beggars belief but there is a growing sentiment that excel is too easy to manipulate (but for me that's the whole point). Most big companise have specialised systems and databases and just use excel as you say for either quick and dirty analysis or graphing (it's still better than all the other systems we have for graphs and charts).

I will keep my fingers crossed about the VBA thing as I don't fancy having to start all over again with Java.

 

[Richard Schollar]

One thing I can guarantee:

Microsoft won't go over to using Java (it's a Sun language).

Maybe C# eventually (which is very much like Java I believe) but not Java.


What would be the best way for Microsoft to alienate a great majority of the power users of its Office products? Dump VBA. It ain't gonna happen.

 

[Von Pookie]

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/developers/fileoverview.mspx

Link was found in this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2005/09/28/475041.aspx

Edit:

Q. Will the old .doc, .ppt, and .xls file formats be available for future releases?
A.

Yes. The current file formats will be available with the next release of the Microsoft Office system of products.

Found here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/developers/filefaq.mspx#ETC