TM1 10.2 Perspectives using 64 Bit Excel?

[RSK]

Are we still in the world of having to use 32 bit excel or has this now been resolved?

I know Excel 2013 is supported but you would have thought they'd push the boat out for 64 bit compatibility also?

[David Usherwood]

CAFE supports XL2013 X64. Don't believe IBM are planning to do the major rewrite of Perspectives which would allow it to support X64.

[RSK]

Thanks

There are a number of product enhancements requests which have been raised apparently, their support team were going to get back to me about if and when they were going to do it. I'm not holding my breath!

[AutomationMan]

RSK - I'd love to hear the final response on this when it comes to hand, mainly because I have a deeply researched issue where on Win7_64-bit with Office_32-bit, we are exhausting a little known OS resource pool resulting in “Insufficient resources to perform this operation” errors and wierd things happen to the Excel UI .... eg Excel menus in a given Excel instance no longer respond to mouse clicks, only keyboard input

My summarized findings on this issue are:

32-bit apps running on 64-bit O/S require additional resources to manage the extended memory addressing available (Handles, PTE’s, User-mode Stack, Kernel-mode stack and Resident available memory) … these are taken from the 32-bit memory resources pool which gets allocated to every instance of a 32-bit app …i.e. 32-bit Excel 2010 in this case.

As certain types of data are loaded within spread-sheet(s) that data draws from this non-pageable resource pool, eventually exhausting same.
This is NOT pageable memory we are talking about so adding as much memory as we like to the system (beyond a basic level) will have zero beneficial effect.
Loading add-ins, extra tool-bars, graphics, opening menus and a myriad other actions all consume these finite resources, worse yet, they are not all returned as worksheets are closed …. until you close that entire instance of Excel and start a fresh instance.

The net result for us is that loading the Cognos client which runs in the same 32-bit address spaces as the Excel instance - OR - loading particular spread-sheets (even though relatively small on-disk [< 1.5MB]) can get 32-bit Excel on a 64-bit O/S to the point of “Insufficient resources to perform this operation”
NB It turns out that under XP they were already “close” to that threshold anyhow

I now have many hours of Perfmon traces for Excel, Cognos, & other apps on both XP (32-bit) and Win7 (64-bit) along with reams of MS and other web research, supporting what is apparently a “known problem” but one which doesn’t get talked about much apart from the many (100’s? of) frustrated users across many web forums who are still trying to work out why their Excel doesn’t work the same under 64-bit windows.

Net result of this is that it probably WOULD be beneficial for us if we could get our Excel power-users onto the 64-bit version of Excel, but to do this will require Cognos support of 64-bit Excel
Regards Col. Sanders

PS
If anyone is interested in the technical details and research I did on this, I have a wealth of research info including output of many of the trace tools I used to investigate this. Shoot me an email as there is too much to post here

[tomok]

I've been running the Excel add-in on 64-bit Windows for years without a problem. Haven't done a whole lot with 10.2 to this point so I can't speak to it but I've never had an issue with any of the earlier add-ins. As has already been stated, CAFE runs on 64-bit Excel and seeing as that appears to be the direction for the future, I don't think you'll see a 64-bit Perspectives.

[AutomationMan]

I've been running the Excel add-in on 64-bit Windows for years without a problem. Haven't done a whole lot with 10.2 to this point so I can't speak to it but I've never had an issue with any of the earlier add-ins. As has already been stated, CAFE runs on 64-bit Excel and seeing as that appears to be the direction for the future, I don't think you'll see a 64-bit Perspectives.

My thanks on that post Tom.
One thing I'm still unclear on which maybe you can shed light on, do you know if CAFE is going to support 64-bit Excel 2010 or just 2013 ... my reading of other posts and doco doesn't seem to mention 64-bit XL 2010 (which is what we are running)
BTW I did post a more detailed question on this over on the General board if you're at all interested in the background http://www.tm1forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10024
Regards Col.

[tomok]

One thing I'm still unclear on which maybe you can shed light on, do you know if CAFE is going to support 64-bit Excel 2010 or just 2013

Only IBM can tell you that and they are very tight-lipped about stuff like that. I am just reading the tea leaves as it regards Perspectives versus CAFE.