Well, Office 2007 Excel Officially Sucks

[Ben]

We've just been migrating to Office 2007 over the last few weeks. I just found out today that Excel no longer supports .dbf format. It's the basic cross platform format for all kinds of geospatial software, and I've got projects from the last ten or so years with tons of .dbf files and relational callouts to .dbf files.

Now I've got to do reams of paperwork for a special waiver for the only workaround I can think of that the .gov will approve, which is to run Open Office alongside MS Office. Totally lame Microsoft....

[mtnbkr]

why not just "downgrade" a couple machines to an older version of Office that supports the files?  Seems that would be simpler than a waiver (govt contractor, I'm familiar with waivers).

Chris

[Ben]

That would be the simple and efficient answer. Unfortunately we're on SCCM, which is programed to remove the older version of whatever the current "approved" version of a product is. So if I put Office 2003 back on a machine, every Friday night when machines are scanned by DC,  it would get wiped and replaced by 2007. Open Office isn't on the "seek and destroy" list, so the software wouldn't "see" it. I could alternatively put 2003 on a machine that's off the network, but then we have to physically transfer files back and forth.

[Josh Aston]

Yes it does.  It's also insanely slow.  We now save our excel documents as 97-03 because opening and modifying them is faster than if they are saved as 07.  Inserting a row into a document with over 5,000 rows takes several minutes in 07.  If the document is saved as a 97-03 it's almost instantaneous, even though I'm using 07 to run it.

[Standing Wolf]

Totally lame Microsoft....

You're being unfair to total lameness.

[Bogie]

Well, my opinion...
 
()*&)(&%()*(*& interface ()*&)*(&%&(^$%&% totally (&*^(&*%(*)^&)*&%&(* sucks *(&%^(*&^(*&^ gigantic *()&&^(*&%(&*%^&(*^% diseased )(*(*)^&(*&%&(^% canker-ridden *()&^(*&%^(*&%&%$^&*%$.
 

[charby]

Ben

I hear you, all the GIS folks I support are up in arms about Excel 07.

-C

[Don't care]

.

[Bogie]

Problem is that many corporate IT departments have supped of the Mickeysoft kool-aid, and they also nuke "unauthorized software" from machines on a regular basis...
 

[Lennyjoe]

We're going to Office 2007 in the next few months.  I am not looking forward to it.  I actually took a college course last fall on Office 2007 and had a hard time with it.  Of all the programs, Excel was the worst.

[Regolith]

.docx files piss me off.  I work at a newspaper, and we have reporters who upgraded to the latest office sending us those files which we can't open because we are still working off much older versions of Office.  Yeah, I know there's a file converter, but we can't install the thing because we don't have administrative access to our Windows machines, and they don't make one for a Mac that I know of.

[ilbob]

that really sucks. our most common data logger uses dbf and excel is slick at opening them up and making sense of 100s of thousands of data points.

[Boomhauer]

We're going to Office 2007 in the next few months.  I am not looking forward to it.  I actually took a college course last fall on Office 2007 and had a hard time with it.  Of all the programs, Excel was the worst.

Same here. The online training course sucked like nothing else.

Our prof. gave up and basically gave everybody a C if they had extreme problems like I did.

[ilbob]

hmm. I had one of our engineers here that has excel 2007 try to open a dbf file. he said it opened fine.

[Marnoot]

From http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2006/08/24/718786.aspx:

Historically Excel has supported many different data formats.  We have determined that a number of these older formats are seldom, if ever used.  We are removing support for some file types to allow us to devote more of our efforts towards the file formats that are being used.  Theses formats are being deprecated in 2 ways.  For the set of file formats with the lowest usage, we will be discontinuing support for opening and saving of these formats.  For the second set that has some minimal usage, we will support loading the files in Excel 2007 to allow you to save them in a newer format.

The following formats cannot be opened or saved in Excel 2007:

    * WK1 (1-2-3)
    * WK4 (1-2-3)
    * WJ3 (1-2-3 Japanese) (.wj3)
    * WKS (1-2-3)
    * WK3,(1-2-3)
    * WK1,FMT(1-2-3)
    * WJ2 (1-2-3 Japanese) (.wj2)
    * WJ3, FJ3 (1-2-3 Japanese) (.wj3)
    * DBF 2 (dBASE II)
    * WQ1 (Quattro Pro/DOS)
    * WK3,FM3(1-2-3)
    * Microsoft Excel Chart (.xlc)
    * WK1,ALL(1-2-3)
    * WJ1 (1-2-3 Japanese) (.wj1)
    * WKS (Works Japanese) (.wks)

The following formats may be opened, but not saved to in Excel 2007:

    * Microsoft Excel 2.1 Worksheet
    * Microsoft Excel 2.1 Macro
    * Microsoft Excel 3.0 Worksheet
    * Microsoft Excel 3.0 Macro
    * Microsoft Excel 4.0 Worksheet
    * Microsoft Excel 4.0 Macro
    * Microsoft Excel 97- Excel 2003 & 5.0/95 Workbook
    * Microsoft Excel 4.0 Workbook
    * DBF 3 (dBASE III)
    * DBF 4 (dBASE IV)

So it looks like it depends on the DBF version.

[Ben]

Yeah, you can open them (most of my stuff is in dbf4), but it doesn't save back to it. Like Bob, I do a lot of manipulation in (old) Excel then save back to dbf so I can do relational callouts to the file in the GIS software I use. There are other formats the GIS software can read, especially newer software, but dbf is kind of an "old-timer" standard and I have way too many projects built over the years to make conversion anywhere near efficient.

[Racehorse]

Yes it does.  It's also insanely slow.  We now save our excel documents as 97-03 because opening and modifying them is faster than if they are saved as 07.  Inserting a row into a document with over 5,000 rows takes several minutes in 07.  If the document is saved as a 97-03 it's almost instantaneous, even though I'm using 07 to run it.

There must be something wrong with your computer. I can insert a row in a file with 500,000 rows, and it only takes about a second or two. I don't notice any difference in speed between the two versions.

[Regolith]

There must be something wrong with your computer. I can insert a row in a file with 500,000 rows, and it only takes about a second or two. I don't notice any difference in speed between the two versions.

His computer is likely older than yours.   Office 2007 probably takes up more system resources than older versions of office, and therefor will run poorly on an older computer, where as a newer computer will have enough horsepower to handle the increased system load.

[MechAg94]

If you have 5000 rows that all need to update off a database every time there is a change, it can slow things down.  You can turn off automatic updates though.  I don't have 2007, but I use big spreadsheets a lot.

[GigaBuist]

Yes it does.  It's also insanely slow.  We now save our excel documents as 97-03 because opening and modifying them is faster than if they are saved as 07.

The new .docx file format is all XML on the inside.  Building the DOM in memory is going to take a while if you don't have enough RAM for the whole thing and you're hitting the swap.  It's not as efficient, but it's a whole lot easier to build and read a simple .docx than a .doc file.

The downside is that the old .doc format was more efficient in terms of pure speed as you've noticed.

For me it's an improvement.  I don't care how fast your computer is, it'll never make .doc more readable. 

[Ben]

Yeah, as I'm installing this on computers at work, I'm definitely seeing a lag in the older systems. We have a couple of old Celerons that are barely handling it. If I hadn't had to update them from 512meg to 1gig ram earlier for Acrobat 9, I doubt they'd be usable with Office 2007.