Just noticed you referred to the system hanging up. Do you have Google Tool Bar installed? XL2007 had an issue with this which made deletion of large ranges very slow; often so slow the system appeared to have hung up. Possibly that was your problem.

I’d be interested to hear the experience of others; in particular has anyonbe found any evidence of the claimed performanance improvements?

I was building a reporting dashboard with gantt charts and finance tables. Installing SP2 saved the project because Excel 2007 is very unstable. I was running SP1 on a powerful laptop with 2 gigs ram and it was poor and crashed often.
I tried saving as xlsb and xlsm formats and both were just as likely to hang up.

SP2 has only clobbered an activex listbox, but has otherwise been acceptable.

Cheers,

http://www.dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2007/06/06/subtracting-binary-fractions/

Here’s a walk through of the imprecision. And to be fair, computers can be precise, but it’s a trade off between speed and accuracy. However, I agree it is a pain when you just want a Balance Sheet that balances.

On the other hand if you really need more than 15 digits precision, you need a different tool.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/78113

It is interesting that as advanced as computers are, you can end up with in inexact result on a very simple additon problem. Nature of the beast.

“=+a2+b2+c2+d2? or “=sum(a2:d2)”

The format has 20 decimal places and values are as follows:

a2 = -2048.01
b2 = 1
c2 = 2048.02
d2 = -1
e2 (the result of the formula) = 0.00999999999976353

I have played with this quite a bit. It appears that if you add a positive
and a negative number with a decimal and the result is within 100+/-, you
start getting the calculation error. I have tried this on XP, Vista and
Windows 7.

So, this works:

(2048.01) + 1948.01 = 100

but

(2048.01) + 1949.01 = -99.0000000000002

This is really bad for all accountants trying to balance a work sheet.

Does anyone know if there is already a patch for SP2?

Pretty underwhelmed so far. If the redrawing time for complex drawings has been improved it isn’t only a marginal improvement.

Anyone else found any worthwhile changes?

Excel is the charting engine for Word and PowerPoint, with Excel charts contained/embedded in Word or PowerPoint shapes (as they are contained in Excel shapes in Excel). In the rush to sweep the debris, I mean the product, out the door, the embedded Excel chart objects were never hooked up with the VBA object model, so they could not be manipulated programmatically. You would have to say that adding the charting OM to PowerPoint and Word is an important bug fix for all three applications. I wouldn’t call it an improvement, since the lack of OM was truly a deficiency, on par with the lack of the macro recording capability.

Well I had hoped that SP2 might bring some improvements for the chart object model *in* Excel VBA. But if they managed to get rid of some of the bugs in the charting engine, that would be great too. (Not that there is too much to complain about: Excel 2007′s charting engine play in an entirely different league than its predecessors of course.)