Comments on: Excel 2007 Compatibility Checker

By: Ken Puls

Ken Puls — Tue, 24 May 2011 22:58:44 +0000

John,

I don’t anticipate that it will ever deal with VBA compatibility. We’ve always had to do our own conditional compilation in code if that is an issue.

By: John Redmon

John Redmon — Sat, 21 May 2011 02:48:28 +0000

Compatabilty checker doesn’t catch VBA sorts created in 2007 and saved in 2003 .xls format. I created a 3 level sort
(originally used record macro for basic code). Worked fine in compatabilty mode. When the End User opened it in Excel 2003 they received a Run Time Error 9 (subscript out of range). Had to change the code to utilize 2003′s Key1, Key2, Key3, DataOption1,2,3 etc. It would be nice if the “Compatabilty Checker” caught the things that mattered.

By: Mark Kania

Mark Kania — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 16:01:02 +0000

I consider the implementation of the Compatibility Checker to be partially buggy.

When opening an Excel document using COM Automation which is supposed to supress all (ALL) screen I/O the Compatibility Checker is displayed in the background.

This causes automated processes to get “stuck” and there is no known way to fix this. It is extremely annoying to say the least. The implementation of this feature should adhere to all standards.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:35:21 +0000

Is it possible to get the details – which cells have the problem? I have only style/format problems which are probably colour.
While it’s useful to know there are 30 incompatible cells, it would be even more useful to know which ones they are so I can modify them!
The checker must know, but where does it put the info? Can you get it to run in a verbose mode?
I guess that as MS considers them minor, they don’t bother giving you the info.

Dave

By: Teri

Teri — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:59:12 +0000

Please disregard my 9/17/09 comment. Apparently, I may not have been using it correctly, because today it’s fantastic! I no longer receive the Compatibility Checker popup.

Your ADDIN works perfectly for me. It works for the new exported Excel files that I create everyday from our database.

Thank you!

By: The Ken Puls Blog » Blog Archive » Disabling the Excel Compatibility Checker

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:35:20 +0000

[...] Due to several comments about how much people hate this thing, I’ve pulled together a very rough, very simple add-in.Â It’s goal is to disable the Compatibility Checker as much as possible. [...]

By: Kasango

Kasango — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:04:18 +0000

Cant somebody please comeup with a solution on how to PERMANENTLY switch off this annoying thing? I have deadlines and it is eating into my time budget!

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 06:19:05 +0000

I would also offer that if you are using automation to save a Excel 2007 file, to a Excel 2003 template, then the compatibility checker will probably be causing issues here as well.

The thing is – how would you turn it off in that situation??

Need to glabally disable it when using some forms of automation….

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 07:05:48 +0000

It would be nice if in the Excel options they had a way to turn off certain compatibility checking. I too was an early adopter with Excel 2007 and am forced to save in 2003 for co-workers. Since I use colors in almost every worksheet–particularly the header row–it’s frustrating that I get the compatibility error just because the colors are off. How can the colors not be compatible?!

What I would prefer, actually, is an “Excel 2003 Color Scheme” so that I could use that by default. I happen to like those colors anyway. This would eliminate the error 99% of the time, leaving the 1% for when I actually do have a backwards-compatibility issue I should be concerned about.

Nevertheless, I wish I could tell Excel to ignore compatibility checking when it is a “minor formatting issue”

By: Diamond

Diamond — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:57:06 +0000

I am having an issue with Excel 2007 saving Execl97-2003 files. The workbooks are about 5-6 megs and if we have a few open at once and try to save them, the system hangs(the cpu utalization pegs at 100%). Any ideas on what’s causing the system to freeze up? Apparently this didn’t happen in Excel 2003, so I am thinking it’s a setting or something.