Compatibility guideline for VBA developers using Office 97 and/or Office 2003

[Roland Sobeck]

Dear all,

I do work for a client who is in progress to migrate its PC Desktop
environement from Office 97 to Office 2003.

As the migration preparation will last for a couple of month, one of its
VBA developers asked me whether a
development guideline exists on how to code VBA applications/macros in
Office 97 such as to be
ideally compatible with an Office 2003, which will be rolled in summer
this year.

Do you know whether such a guideline is available?
Well I know it is not common practice to migrate from Office 97 to Office
2003.

Any hints would be highly appreciated.

Regards,
Roland Sobeck
Germany
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Jonathan West]

The only real guideline I can offer is this.

Do all your development in the oldest version of Office which you need to
support.

Test the code in all the newer versions you will also have to support.

There aren't all that very many cases where objects available in Office 97
have been changed or removed in a way that makes code not work in later
versions. You may run across one or two as well as a few cases of changed
behaviour, so that is what your testing on later versions is intended to
smoke out.

But there are a lot of *additional* objects in later versions which aren't
available in Office 97, so if you do your coding in the later version, you
are quite likely to accidentally use a feature that isn't available in
Office 97.

--
Regards
Jonathan West - Word MVP
www.intelligentdocuments.co.uk
Please reply to the newsgroup
Keep your VBA code safe, sign the ClassicVB petition www.classicvb.org

 

[Tom Winter]

Here's a related article:

INFO: Writing Automation Clients for Multiple Office Versions
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;244167