What s New in Excel 2003

What's New in Excel 2003

For VBA programmers, relatively little has changed in Excel 2003. There are no visible innovations in the basic VBA functions, and there are only a few new objects in the Excel library, and their use is confined to two areas:

• Ranges of cells within a worksheet can be changed into a list. This does not affect the data; the range appears framed in blue, and there are some new functions available that simplify list processing in comparison to earlier versions of Excel. These functions can also be executed in VBA code.

• Excel 2003 offers more and better possibilities for import, processing, and export of XML data.

In testing the example files for this book I have found no compatibility problems with Excel 2002. Therefore, all the example problems of this book should work. In this regard, Excel 2003 seems to cause many fewer problems than have previous Excel updates. How stably Excel 2003 runs cannot be determined, due to the beta status. (This beta version has some problems, but it is hoped and expected that they will be resolved.)

You may be asking yourself whether an upgrade to Excel 2003 is worthwhile. The answer depends on whether you are using Excel in isolation or as part of the Office package. In Excel itself the changes are, as we have said, rather modest; an update makes sense only if Excel is to be used for processing external XML data. The story is different if you are viewing the Office suite as an entire package. In some of the Office components there are significant improvements and extensions. The most important points are listed below. (Many more arguments and advertisements in favor of Office can be found at Microsoft's web site.)

• The e-mail and communication program Outlook has been greatly improved, and it contains mature protection mechanisms against "spam" (that is, against unwanted "junk" e-mail).

• There are new functions for shared processing of Office documents. (However, many of the new functions require that a SharePoint server, a new Microsoft program, be available in the local network.)

• The new Office component InfoPath should simplify the processing of formulas.

• The new Office component OneNote should allow for an intuitive way of working with ideas and notes.

• The integration of XML functions is more mature and multifaceted than in Office 2002.

Looking at all of this, it would appear that Office has been optimized primarily in view of networked commercial applications, while little has changed for the private user . Even the fact that Office 2003 assumes Windows 200x/XP as an operating system supports this conjecture. (Windows 9x/ME is explicitly no longer supported.)