The only thing worse than 2007 is 2007 on Vista. Every try and drag an object in a Webex session? It locks up your PC – totally. Nice job, MS.

It’s never too late te leave me a comment!

I’ve never noticed this problem, but I don’t use workbooks I’ve made in 2007 in earlier versions. I’m sure some have noticed it. I don’t think it would be high on the list of things to fix, since it would perhaps encourage people to upgrade.

This might be a late comment, but I have a problem with Excel 2007 charts that no one else seems to have brought up. If I create a chart in Excel 2007 and save it in a .xls file under compatibility mode, then give that chart to someone with Excel 2000 or Excel 2003, they cannot see the entire chart. The legend or y-axis text is cropped/truncated.

It appears that the “compatibility mode” of Excel 2007 is not really compatible with earlier versions of Excel. For that reason, I do not use 2007 to create charts that I intend to share with others using earlier Excel versions. Am I the only one with this kind of problem?

Rene

I found a recent survey you might be interested in, on Excel French site ” http://www.excel-downloads.com/” regarding Excel versions

Out of 3324 answers between 06/13/2008 au 08/31/2008 :

1 – Excel 2003 : 44,9%
2 – Excel 2007 : 30,6%
3 – Excel 2000 : 7,6%
4 – Excel XP : 5,9%
5 – Excel 97 : 4%
6 – Excel 2004 MAC : 3,1%
7 – Excel 2002 : 2,9%
8 – Others : 0,9%

Rgards

Many people have kept 2003 installed on their machines, and installed 2007 in addition. You should use a different installation directory name, for example

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Excel 2007\

instead of

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Excel\

There are issues, there will always be issues, with running multiple versions of Office on the same machine. Microsoft doesn’t support multiple installations on the same machine, and I cannot endorse it.

On my own machine I have Virtual PC installed, which lets me use a separate virtual machine for each installation I need to use in my development environment.

Firstly, great site, great info.

I’m about to make the leap into the world of 2007, so I think antialiasing is the least of my worries. For the first time last night I opened one of my ‘every day’ files in 2007 and the charts I saw were rendered completely incorrectly. It was late, so I just closed it and pretended everything was ok.

At the moment I’m trying to find a way of having 2003 & 2007 on the same machine simultaneously, but I don’t think there’s a ‘clean’ way.

I think I’ll have to go head first.

I fully agree. “keep it simple” should be the key word.

Developers, like any professional, will do their best and demonstrate their ability to be creative ; add more new features ; with more colors and 3D glowing spinning flashy effects…. because it’s cool

When users the want fewer things that work fine.

Definitely, plethora of features is not the solution :
it is hard to organize them, complicated to fit them in a tool bar (even on a Ribbon) and final users will only use 10% of them in most cases.

Development teams should definitely include more users (not designers nor programmers… just advanced users) that are able to express (and defend) their needs, temper the enthusiasm of coders…

Stick to core needs, improve usability before adding features.
Make efficient tools, not cool tools

But we all know that, isn’t it

I can understand both viewpoints as I spend my day in both 2003 and 2007 (as a business user not a developer). I can say that this is probably one of the things I worry least about in 2007, but I love your idea of putting together a longer version of the article detailing all of Excel 2007 Charts failings. If we could even kinda of go Wiki with it I think that would be even better. As someone who makes his living doing data analysis in financial services, Microsoft seriously handicapped my productivity when it redesigned the charting engine. I think we have a right to be angry and a duty to make our views known to Redmond. When there are individuals building full Sparklines functionality into Excel through open source and doing more for Excel charting then Microsoft did in all of Excel 2007, then we must do something.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sparklinesforxl/

After having read the Excel developers blog for the last year I understand why 2007 s**ks so bad, it seems they’re more interested in trying to get Excel to work on the web then actually making it better for the rest of us.

On a related note, Microsoft must have only user tested 2007 with people who little to no knowledge of Excel. No one that I am aware of in the financial services industry has made the move to 2007 nor do they plan too because of what’s been done to Excel. Many traders, bankers, and analysts would literally throw the computer out the window if they had to deal with 2007 and after now working with it for over 6 months I can’t say that I would blame them.

Wanna make Excel pretty for Grandma, fine – make it push button friendly and let her type in her contact list. But don’t expect the guy who is trying to complete a merger valuation at 3:00 in the morning to relearn a program that he was an expert in. There is no chance Microsoft took this application into any investment bank because they would have screamed bloody murder. Maybe for this next iteration they will try to get power users involved in the business requirement solicitation and user testing.