Multiple versions of Excel

[Fionnuala]

Hello,
We are using 9.4 FP2 and Excel 2003. We will be moving to Excel 2007 but some of the users want to continue to have the option of using Excel 2003. All users access Tm1 via a terminal server so I’m looking to see if anyone has experienced any excel problems with two versions of excel with Tm1?
The default would be set for TM1 to load with Excel 2007.

Thanks,
Fionnuala

[jim wood]

I've never done this but I can't see it being an issue. The only issue I can see is if you have TM1 Web installed on the terminal server they use to access TM1. It may do something to the excel service.

[Alan Kirk]

Hello,
We are using 9.4 FP2 and Excel 2003. We will be moving to Excel 2007 but some of the users want to continue to have the option of using Excel 2003. All users access Tm1 via a terminal server so I’m looking to see if anyone has experienced any excel problems with two versions of excel with Tm1?
The default would be set for TM1 to load with Excel 2007.

I would advise strongly against it. On my notebook I have every version of Office from 97 to 2010. This is a hangover from my old days on the Excel Usenet forums when I'd need to test out scenarios against different versions. Although the practice has always been "not recommended" by Microsoft, as long as I installed from oldest to newest I didn't have any problems switching between any version up to 2003. (And, of course, only one version of Outlook.)

That piece of sh...oftware 2007, on the other hand...

If I switch between 2007 (more commonly 2010 these days) and 2003, it will usually trigger a "preparing to install" dialog which can be cancelled without a problem. Going the other way, however, 2007 will have quite the hissy fit if you cancel its precious install dialog telling you that certain features are no longer working and won't work until you let it do what it wants to do, when it wants to do it. There hasn't actually been any functionality breakage that I've been able to discern, though 2007 seemed less stable, more prone to a crash or a hang after a switch from 2003 than it did if I had been using 2007 alone for a while. 2003 didn't seem to suffer from that and seemed as stable after a switch from 2007 as it did normally.

Using Outlook 2010 (previously 2007) while continuing to use the rest of Office 2003 didn't seem to present a problem, only swapping between versions of a single application.

When I need to do training materials for 2010 these days I swap from my normal login (where I generally only use 2003 for Word and Excel; don't get me started on having multiple versions of Access installed) to a second one where I use only 2010. That seems to work well enough but wouldn't be viable for your situation.

I definitely wouldn't recommend using both versions operationally. It'll work, generally, but isn't worth the potential support headaches.

[Harvey]

It's usually a headache to mix different versions of Office, as the above posted has laid out.

When I need to run an older version of Excel, I use a Virtual Machine. This way, I can create as many clean environments as I like, with specific versions of Excel and TM1 to target the client's particular platform.

You could potentially do something similar with Terminal Server, but perhaps licensing would get complex if you ran two virtual copies of TS? I did have a client who used to run multiple VMs that they would connect to remotely. There were licensing discussions, but, unfortunately, I don't recall the outcome.

Alternatively, running a VM inside TS would use up a lot of RAM and wouldn't be feasible either.

So I guess this post is a little useless, but I thought I'd throw the info out there on the chance it'll get someone thinking of a better solution !

[Fionnuala]

Thanks very much for the advice & comments- much appreciated.
Upgrading to Excel 2010 and v 9.5.2 in the near future is another option. Does anyone have any negative experiences with using Excel 2010 & 9.5.2?
Thanks,
Fionnuala

[lotsaram]

Upgrading to Excel 2010 and v 9.5.2 in the near future is another option. Does anyone have any negative experiences with using Excel 2010 & 9.5.2?

Nope. Quite the contrary, have found 9.5.2 with both 2007 and 2010 to be very reliable. It is definitely better with 2010 as the screen real-estate hogging ribbon tabs are compressed with dropdown menus for spreading, developer and servers which is an improvement and gets around the ribbon refresh lag issue.