office 2003

[Gonzo]

What happens to VBA in the latest version of Office? Is it
supported/backward compatable?

 

[Jonathan West]

What happens to VBA in the latest version of Office? Is it
supported/backward compatable?

Yes, it is. There are probably some changes in behaviour in some areas, but
generally, code designed for Word 2K or Word 2002 works on Word 2003. You
should do a detailed test though in case you hit a problem area.

I recently did that with an application consisting of several thousand lines
of VBA code designed under Word 2000. It required 3 lines to be changed for
Word 2002, and nothing more at all for Word 2003. I was impressed.

I can't speak about the other Office applications, so your mileage may vary.
Test everything thoroughly.

 

[MARY MCRAE]

I have a VBA application that I built for Word 2000; it does weird things
when I run it in 2003. I never used XP, so I don't know if the problems were
introduced in XP or 2003, but I know that I have to go back and do some
testing to figure out what needs to be changed. Of course, since my client
is just moving to Office 2000, I don't think I need to worry about it for
another 2 or 3 years ;-)

 

[Steve Lang]

Hi Jonathan,

I'm curious what you had to change.

FWIW - in my case, moving from 2000 to XP I noticed a distinct difference in
behavior in how the insertion point interpreted the character style. In
Word2K, if the IP was placed between two different named character styles,
querying Selection.Style property would result in the style of the character
to the right of the IP. However in WordXP, Selection.Style gives the style
of the character to the left of the IP.
I don't know if this is global or just in our Office environment, but since
my code works a lot with styles, that subtle difference had a profound
impact in my code.

Steve Lang

 

[Jonathan West]

Hi Jonathan,

I'm curious what you had to change.

All I had to change was a couple of lines declaring objects in external
ActiveX DLLs. Presumably because new objects had appeared in the Word object
model, I had to more fully qualify the references to the external objects.

FWIW - in my case, moving from 2000 to XP I noticed a distinct difference in
behavior in how the insertion point interpreted the character style. In
Word2K, if the IP was placed between two different named character styles,
querying Selection.Style property would result in the style of the character
to the right of the IP. However in WordXP, Selection.Style gives the style
of the character to the left of the IP.
I don't know if this is global or just in our Office environment, but since
my code works a lot with styles, that subtle difference had a profound
impact in my code.

Hmmm. I didn't come across that in my code, but then my application was
dealing with something different.