Hi all
Read the information about the changes in Office 2007 SP2 on this page:
http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/default.aspx
Regards Ron de Bruin
12 thoughts on “Office 2007 SP2”
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“When many graphic objects are present performance has been improved.”
It certainly needed improvement, I hope they will be able to insert a “greatly” between the been and improved.
“The charting mechanism has improved robustness and targeted performance improvements. “
I find the wording of the bit about performance a bit of a worry. They have “targeted” performance improvements. Does that mean they don’t know if they actually achieved them?
Recent fixes have had improvements to stability when editing charts copied and pasted from one workbook to another. I hope they have completed that process, because as it stands I can make Excel crash any time I want.
I note there is no other reference to performance improvements in Excel. Disapointing.
This is an Excel improvement?
“A chart object model has been added to Word and PowerPoint.”
“A chart object model has been added to Word and PowerPoint.”
Well I had hoped that SP2 might bring some improvements for the chart object model *in* Excel VBA. But if they managed to get rid of some of the bugs in the charting engine, that would be great too. (Not that there is too much to complain about: Excel 2007’s charting engine play in an entirely different league than its predecessors of course.)
Doug, I think “targeted” is used there as an adjective. In other words, the performance improvements are not willy-nilly or scattershot, but rather limited and laser-like. I hope that lifts your spirits :).
Ken –
Excel is the charting engine for Word and PowerPoint, with Excel charts contained/embedded in Word or PowerPoint shapes (as they are contained in Excel shapes in Excel). In the rush to sweep the debris, I mean the product, out the door, the embedded Excel chart objects were never hooked up with the VBA object model, so they could not be manipulated programmatically. You would have to say that adding the charting OM to PowerPoint and Word is an important bug fix for all three applications. I wouldn’t call it an improvement, since the lack of OM was truly a deficiency, on par with the lack of the macro recording capability.
Downloaded and installed SP2 yesterday.
Pretty underwhelmed so far. If the redrawing time for complex drawings has been improved it isn’t only a marginal improvement.
Anyone else found any worthwhile changes?
I have a simple formula in cell e2:
“=+a2+b2+c2+d2? or “=sum(a2:d2)”
The format has 20 decimal places and values are as follows:
a2 = -2048.01
b2 = 1
c2 = 2048.02
d2 = -1
e2 (the result of the formula) = 0.00999999999976353
I have played with this quite a bit. It appears that if you add a positive
and a negative number with a decimal and the result is within 100+/-, you
start getting the calculation error. I have tried this on XP, Vista and
Windows 7.
So, this works:
(2048.01) + 1948.01 = 100
but
(2048.01) + 1949.01 = -99.0000000000002
This is really bad for all accountants trying to balance a work sheet.
Does anyone know if there is already a patch for SP2?
I jumped the gun there. Not a problem specific to SP2 or Excel 2007, just never realized it before.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/78113
It is interesting that as advanced as computers are, you can end up with in inexact result on a very simple additon problem. Nature of the beast.
Tim – if you need to get an exact balance, and you are working with money (i.e. you need 2 decimal places) you can apply the ROUND() function to any values you want to balance, or just format to 2 decimal places.
On the other hand if you really need more than 15 digits precision, you need a different tool.
Tim:
http://www.dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2007/06/06/subtracting-binary-fractions/
Here’s a walk through of the imprecision. And to be fair, computers can be precise, but it’s a trade off between speed and accuracy. However, I agree it is a pain when you just want a Balance Sheet that balances. :)
I response to Doug J’s comment about being underwhelmed by SP2.
I was building a reporting dashboard with gantt charts and finance tables. Installing SP2 saved the project because Excel 2007 is very unstable. I was running SP1 on a powerful laptop with 2 gigs ram and it was poor and crashed often.
I tried saving as xlsb and xlsm formats and both were just as likely to hang up.
SP2 has only clobbered an activex listbox, but has otherwise been acceptable.
Cheers,
Bob – that’s strange, I have found 2007 more stable than previous versions, especially with very large files. The only problem I had was with one file that had crashed ocaisionally in previous versions, but in 2007 crashed instantly on start up. I tracked that down to an incorectly dimensioned array in a UDF, and after I fixed that it was no trouble at all, so I can’t really blame Excel for that one.
Just noticed you referred to the system hanging up. Do you have Google Tool Bar installed? XL2007 had an issue with this which made deletion of large ranges very slow; often so slow the system appeared to have hung up. Possibly that was your problem.
I’d be interested to hear the experience of others; in particular has anyonbe found any evidence of the claimed performanance improvements?