Legacy issues upgrading to Office 2007 from Office 2003 VBA

[Hank]

Hi All,
I have a few thousand users and am testing 2007 for deployment. I
scanned our shared drive and have encountered literally thousands of Excel
and Access applications that have VBA code in them. I have uncovered many
that just don't work in 2007 without modification. In most (if not all)
cases, the code changes revolve around creating/displaying menu bars... big
surprise.
I have run searches on MSDN and google but have come up with virtually
nothing about VBA backward compatibility. I did find references to the VBA
updater but that app (from the little I could find about it) is for older
versions of VBA and not for 2007.
Have I been looking in the wrong places? Not asking the right
questions? If anyone has any insight or resources please let me know!!

Thanks,
Hank

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi Hank,

You may want to also post this in the MS Office Developer discussion group (link in 'A.' below) as well as in the Excel, Access or
Word specific VBA/programming discussion groups (links in 'B.', below)

The folks there would likely be more familiar with issues and considerations for specific macro/automation migration needs

=============
Hi All,
I have a few thousand users and am testing 2007 for deployment. I
scanned our shared drive and have encountered literally thousands of Excel
and Access applications that have VBA code in them. I have uncovered many
that just don't work in 2007 without modification. In most (if not all)
cases, the code changes revolve around creating/displaying menu bars... big
surprise.
I have run searches on MSDN and google but have come up with virtually
nothing about VBA backward compatibility. I did find references to the VBA
updater but that app (from the little I could find about it) is for older
versions of VBA and not for 2007.
Have I been looking in the wrong places? Not asking the right
questions? If anyone has any insight or resources please let me know!!

Thanks,
Hank>>
--
Please let us know if this has helped,

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

LINKS
A. Specific newsgroup/discussion group mentioned in this message:
news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.officedev
or via browser:
http://microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/?dg=microsoft.public.officedev

B. MS Office Community discussion/newsgroup list via Web Browser
http://microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx
or
Microsoft hosted newsgroups via Outlook Express/newsreader
news://msnews.microsoft.com

 

[Harlan Grove]

    I have a few thousand users and am testing 2007 for deployment.  I
scanned our shared drive and have encountered literally thousands of Excel
and Access applications that have VBA code in them.  I have uncovered many
that just don't work in 2007 without modification.  In most (if not all)
cases, the code changes revolve around creating/displaying menu bars... big
surprise.

....

If you have custom applications that make heavy use of toolbars, then
you shouldn't imagine you'd be ready to 'upgrade' to Office 2007 until
you have usable alternatives for the most heavily used of them. If the
'developers' of these custom applications don't have the words
'programmer' or 'developer' in their job titles, it's likely they're
not going to be able to convert their toolbars into ribbon tabs unless
your company is prepared to spend $$$$ on training for them. The
alternative is spending $$$$$ on outside consultants to do the
conversion programming.

There are other gotchas, at least in Excel. In Excel 2003 and prior,
the result of somerange.Cells.Count could always be stored in a Long
(32-bit integer). No longer. You'll need to store .Count results in
either Double or Variant/Decimal variables. Otherwise you could get
unexpected overflow errors.

Check microsoft.public.excel.programming for other upgrading problems.

The more pessimistic but much more realistic/practial alternative
would be starting the conversion process now but planning to skip
upgrading to Office 2007 and wait for Office 14. Just as Office 97 was
immensely better than Office 5/95 (the first version with VBA and an
object model), Office 14 is likely to provide the ribbon and updated
object model DONE RIGHT (if it can be done right).