General questions about VB6/2005 and Excel 2007 compatibility

[RMR_Man]

Hello,

I'm not sure where or how to ask these questions, so bear with me because I
am new to these forums.

I'm a programmer and relatively new to .NET. My company will soon be
upgrading from Office 2003 to 2007 (in about 6 months, give or take). To
complicate matters, we are also transitioning many of our VB6 applications to
VB 2005.

Our VB6 and VB.NET programs interoperate fine with Office 2003. The programs
export data to Excel (both .xls and .csv formats). With respect to Access,
they simply read from and write to tables. Again, there seems to be no
compatibility issues with Excel/Access 2003, with either VB6 or VB 2005.

So, the big question is this:

Will the VB6 / VB2005 programs operate as expected (that is, with Excel and
Access 2003) with the same Office 2007 apps? I realize this is an extremely
general question, so I guess what I need to know is where I can get
information on compatibility issues. What web sites, articles, etc., would
be helpful?

I'm trying to compile a list of known issues so that we can develop a plan
to try to deal with Office 2007 contingencies.

Thanks in advance,

Russ

 

[Bob Phillips]

If you rely on the code as business critical code, get a consultant in. I am
serious, if it is important, you should take the migration seriously and buy
in expertise.

 

[Tim Zych]

Testing..testing..testing.

Just to add another viewpoint, to my knowledge there is no big book that can
be dropped from above that lists every little change (and if there was, it
would be gigantic). For the most part, most of what you have *should* work
(Microsoft is unbelievably great at backward compatibility) but the way to
really know is to test everything in a new "test" environment. To add to
Bob's suggestion, you might want to devote a test manager to run test
scenarios so that you can run all of the code in the new environment. You'll
also want to know if any data is modified or calculated differently in the
new environment, so that should be part of the test.

Recently I tested a very complicated Excel solution that was created in
Excel 2003, in 2007. The only thing Excel complained about was that I could
not use one range name...since it was reserved by Excel 2007. Literally, and
I mean literally, everything else worked in 2007 with no modification.
Pretty nice.