My company switched to Office 2007 (why not 2010???) a few months ago due to communication issues with a software vendor who is doing a big install here. Since then I have spent dozens of hours reworking spreadsheets and yesterday I experienced the most entertaining visit I’ve ever had with my boss as I watched him struggle with the Ribbon Bar to add his thoughts to my annual budget worksheet out on a shared drive.

The upshot of this is that I now do most of my work in Open Office 3 and import the files into Office 2007 if I need to send them to a collegue.

On the home front, I bought a cheap quad-core PC, added a second drive, blew away Win 7, and loaded Ubuntu 10.10 and Open Office 3 in a Raid 0 environment. Boots up in about 15 seconds, Open Office Calc works great with no “ribbon”, NO VIRUSES, and Google Chrome Browser is a rocket.

Big plus – I have a copy of XP-Pro that runs as a virtual machine in case I need to log into work. The last time the virtual XP session crashed – I didn’t waste a day debugging things – I just deleted the session and loaded the last good snapshot – took about a minute. When was the last time you EVER fixed anything in MS-Office or Windows in a minute?

I love it – now if I could just convince our CIO!

I can work without 2007, but not without 2003 version. Also I don’t use Vista or XP for the same reason – too bloated. I run everything on Windows 2003. That’s the best Windows OS for business so far – best functioning windows to run excel 2003. Softy is yet to come with anything better they made in 2003.

I’m sure most of you have already read these articles, but the benefits of .xlsb are identified here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2006/07/20/671995.aspx
And yes, the article does say “once loaded into memory, the file format has no effect on application/calculation speed”.

And a quote from the ‘Improving Performance in Excel 2007′ MSDN article which Charles Williams wrote.
“XLSB is the Excel 2007 binary format. It is structured as a compressed folder that contains a large number of binary files. It is much more compact than the XLS format, but the amount of compression very much depends on the contents of the workbook. For example, ten workbooks show a size reduction factor ranging from two to eight with an average reduction factor of four. In Excel 2007, opening and saving performance is only slightly slower than the XLS format.”

Maybe I’ll find some time to use, http://www.blog.methodsinexcel.co.uk/2007/05/11/mie-cal-tool-beta/, and do a quick calculation speed test on this file in each of the different formats. I’ll post back if I do.

And yes, Excel 2003 does open .xlsb files when it has the converter installed. .xlsb basically gives the improvements of 2007 without sacrificing the substandard performance issues of the xml file formats.

If we ever need the .xlsx for MOSS support or something I suppose we can save the needed files in the open standard. Or, as Microsoft continues to work with the xml formats and nails the performance issues we’ll simply switch over at that time.

Here’s a real-world example. While working with Beta , I created many xlsx files that will not open in the final release of Excel 2007. Microsoft made it such that I would have to reinstall Beta 2, open them there, and save while in Beta 2. What a pain.

Instead, I simply opened the xlsx packages and change a few namespaces in the beta-created xlsx files. All those file work in Excel 2007 now. Open XML in action! I dare say that this is one of many situations that this new technology will come in handy.

Also, I don’t know whether the Office 2007 conversion tool for older Office versions supports the xlsb format. If it doesn’t you’ll have to save to a different format first so your recipient can use your xlsb files.

I wonder if we’ll ever regret not using the new open standard format? I highly doubt though.

“For the more sophisticated users, I see a lot of benefit, but for avearge users, again, I doubt that they’ll even notice.”

I agree with this assessment.

Brett -

“I’m not looking forward to learning how to modify the ribbon.”

I wasn’t either, but I had a client request, so I jumped in head first. I had to, since I like to claim to be willing to learn new things.

There are already a fair number of online resources for this, and it isn’t too difficult. Being open to digging into the XML file structure is a prerequisite. I still can’t make the ribbon work as nicely as I can make command bars work, but part of that is that (IMO) the ribbon doesn’t work as nicely as command bars work.