excel 2007 compare to excel 2010

[VISHAL120]

Hi can anyone explain me. what is the main difference between these two versions.

as i need to upgrade and don't really know the main difference in between.

thanks for a promt reply.

[Bob Phillips]

Off the top of my head

- 2010 provides a degree of ribbon customisation
- the macro recorder works again
- 2010 has sparklines
- 2010 pivots have slicers
- 2010 is much more robust and stable
- 2010 replaces the Office button with Backstage
- a few new functions

Overall, worth the upgrade.

[VISHAL120]

hi XLd,

Many thanks for your prompt reply. its clear.

[JWhite]

One other big advantage of Excel 2010 is being able to go beyond the 2GB memory limit for Excel. I've been testing 64-bit Excel 2010 under 64-bit Windows 7 and it's going well.

We have some clients who want to load huge amounts of data and I can confirm that the 64-bit version handles it with no problem. I've loaded up to 8GB into a pivottable and it still works with reasonable speed. I would caution anyone that wants to use 64-bit Excel that you should have about 2GB more RAM than the data you expect to load. For example, I have 8GB RAM on my machine and found that performance was good as long as I didn't load more than 6GB of data. Beyond that it deteriorated very quickly.

The reason was soon obvious - it was having to use virtual memory for part of the workbook. Virtual memory works fine when you're switching from one program to another but not when one workbook is partly in RAM and partly in virtual memory. You may just want to move your cursor to another cell but if that cell is part of what's switched out to virtual memory it has to do a lot of work. I was getting response times of over 30 minutes for simple commands.

FYI, Microsoft warns that 64-bit Excel is no faster than 32-bit Excel and my tests agree with that.

[Bob Phillips]

Use PowerPivot. PP uses a compression technique called VertiPak, and I have loaded a 58Mb file in 32-bit PP. You can then pivot the PP data.

[JWhite]

I've played with PP a little but my application, which is part VBA and part VB.Net, is written for pivottables so my immediate interest was to see if my application still worked OK under 64-bit. None of our clients has upgraded to 2010 yet so I haven't had any incentive to rewrite anything for PP.

Have you done any programming with PP? Did they give us a full set of VBA commands to take advantage of it? It's very impressive the way it handles such huge volumes so quickly.

[Bob Phillips]

No, that is its biggest drawback at present, the OM is not exposed to VBA. I hope that will change, and soon.

[CJM3407]

Very Helpful