Excel 2010 64-bit Problems

Posted on by Dick Kusleika

I upgraded to Office 2010 64-bit this morning and it’s not working out for me. I was offered the upgrade at work and of course I took it. Why wouldn’t I? Here are the problems I’ve encountered so far.

I can’t add menu items to the VBE. I have this line of code

Set MenuEvent.EvtHandler = Application.VBE.Events.CommandBarEvents(CmdBarItem)

that I got from Chip Pearson. Someone asked the question on the MSDN forum, but did not get an answer. That didn’t stop some Microsoft douche-nozzle from marking a response as “the answer”. Those forums suck for that reason.

frustrated

Next, MZ Tools doesn’t work on 64-bit.

Next, CodeCleaner doesn’t work on 64-bit.

Nothing important, just three things I use every single day. Dang.

My plan is to search for updates to Office 2010 and hope that it was fixed. It was a recent clean install, so I expect that it’s up-to-date, but we’ll see. If that doesn’t work, then I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to put the menu on a userform and futz around with the window handles to make it a child of the VBE. Ugh.

Part two of my plan is to rewrite CodeCleaner for 64-bit. How hard could that be? It was only written by two of the best VBA programmers in history. Part three is replicating my favorite parts of MZ Tools in 64 bit.

I’ll be shoe-horning this three part plan into year-end, a technical review of a book, development of an add-in for sale, a consulting gig, and college football season. End rant.

15 thoughts on “Excel 2010 64-bit Problems”

  1. Excel 2010 was so unstable (crashed all the time) that we had to revert back to 2007. I hope 2013 is better.

  2. I see similar problems (VBE menu) in Name Manager. It seems not to work very well on the 64 bit VBE (though it does add the menu and even updates it, it does not seem to respond to its events).

    If you manage to update smartindenter to 64 bit Office that would be awesome!

  3. Smart Indenter also doesn’t work in 64-bit. I see Jan Karel noted that. Older versions of Smart Indenter and Code Cleaner were written in VBA, not COM, so in principle they will work in 64-bit installations. I think these older versions are still available, even though they were written for Excel 97 (Excel 2000 was the first that allowed COM add-ins).

    I’m reduced to installing 64-bit Excel 2010 and 2-13 on a spare computer, just to test things, and keep developing on my main computer in 32-bit.

  4. Not to mention the dreaded and un-flexible, non-programmable ribbons in newer Excels!
    XL2003 still the king!

  6. a response to two comments:
    1) “Excel 2010 was so unstable …..”
    Now fixed (finally) With the Office 2010 SP2 update

    2) “Not to mention the dreaded and un-flexible, non-programmable ….”
    Not true. Easy to do if you know how to. Once you get used to them,
    GUI is much faster from a user perspective than nested command bar menus.

  7. “I hope 2013 is better.”

    So I think 2013 64bit Professional Plus is garbage. I am not sure if it is the 64bit or what but this thing crashes so much that we have learned to arbitrarily create a version control by constantly resaving the files as v0.1 then v0.2 etc until the project is complete. We do this because it can crash and be completely corrupt and not even open again. This has happened while we were playing in Power Pivot, just writing formulas in excel itself AND we have even had it crash out during a super simple ONE line of code vba to literally filter a pivot table (as a test).

    Overall it looks great and I LOVE the dual monitor situation but I have never experienced so many issues with any microsoft software before in my life… and I had Vista.

    I have since uninstalled 2013, then installed 2010 64bit with PowerPivot before reinstalling 2013, just so if ’13 bombs out on us so much we can attempt to keep working with the 2010 version.

    It’s a shame because I love Excel and microsoft products and I really want to like 2013 but I just cant understand what makes it so volatile.

  8. @M Simms
    I agree that the 2010 UI Is better than standard 2003 AFTER you learn it, BUT the measure of usability for me is the number of one-click buttons available. While the QAT helps, my custom 2003 menu set was much faster. Flexibility of programming was higher as well.

  9. FWIW, addins that manipulate the VBE are horribly unstable when written in VBA – because they’re modifying the VBE as the VBE is executing the code. At the time of writing, you also couldn’t include any windows message handlers (e.g. for keyboard shortcuts) due to the VBE’s propensity to recompile the project and corrupt the message handler chain.

    If someone created a 64-bit VB6…

  11. So, didja ever get that MZ Tools working on 64 bit office? I’d be willing to pay TENS of dollars for that feature!

  13. Excel still sucks. There a memory leak somewhere. It goes crazy and won’t even let me save after a while. Even with the latest updates.

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