Excel 2003 and Excel 2007

Hello,
I have Excel 2003 and 2007 installed in my system. But i have Excel
application which is developed in Excel 2007 version. I am running in to
below issue.

If i open the Excel 2003 first and open the Excel 2007 application it is
trying to open in the Excel 2003 even than it is .XLSM file as extention. the
error is i am getting is "This file is not in a recognizable format".

Right now for timebeing i have done a work around. Writting a batch file

@echo off
cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\
excel.exe C:\ABC.xlsm
EXIT

Please let me know if any body have any suggestions on this issue.

Regards,
Prasanna

Prasanna

I only have Excel 2000 and 2007 on my machine, but I can't imagine it's any different for 2003. What I did is associated my xls, xla, xlt (old type file extensions) with 2007. That way, 2007 is my 'favoured' version and for the very odd occasion I need to open a file in 2000, I do a File>Open... from within that application/version.

Any good?

Nick,

Thanks for the quick response. We tried all that but still it opens in the 2003. I have done a association of the files also.

I actually have a bigger probelm than that. Which is I have the C# DLL which is called in my Excel macro. They way i am invoking is i have a action buttion which is placed above my Menu . I have not seen that kind of buttion in the EXCEL 2003. But it is not a normal forum which u place in Excel Cell area.

When i click on that buttion i call a C# dll. If my Excel 2003 is open, my control is going back to Excel 2003. The problem i have client does some work on the Excel 2003 while he is working on the 2007.

The way I am invoking the C# DLL as follows

Set ObjTest = New ComName.ClsName

Please let me know if you have any pointers. 

Regards,

Prasanna 

Prasanna,

When we develop .NET solutions (VB or C#) that target Excel the CLR needs to communicate with Excel through an interop layer (PIA - Primarily Interop Assembly). The PIAs are version specific, i e Excel 2003 has its own PIAs which also Excel 2007 has. The CLR can only handle one version of the PIAs and if I remember it right it use the version of the second installed Excel.

The above explain also why MSFT recommend to only have one version of MS Office installed on a computer.

I am surprised you even got them both to work simultaneously.  I developed a C# application with a function to use Excel as an output destination.  It was a simple automation that just dumped a datagrid into a worksheet for the user to manipulate.  Since my users were working with Excel 2000/2003, I had to install 2000 so that I could bind to the oldest Excel library I needed to support.  Anyway, after I installed that alongside Excel 2007, I ended up with corrupt versions of Excel that only launched for long enough to crash and would not properly uninstall to the point that I had to reformat and start over.  Fun stuff.

If you must have both versions installed, I would seriously recommend using a virtual machine for the one you use least.  Virtual Box is freeware and does a fine job.  Another alternative is to use Thinstall, though I'm not sure if it's cost effective.  Thinstall basically installs the entire application and virtual machine into a single excecutable file so you end up with a single Excel.exe file which is a couple of hundred MB large that has all the directories, registry entries, etc all self contained.  Despite the size, it works fast and reliably.  I Thinstalled all of Office 2007 with the intent to do a proper install in the future.  That was months ago, and I have yet to come up with any reason to do a proper install.

Thanks for the update.

I must say another pecular behavior, If i open Excel 2007 first and open Excel 2003 later it works fine. Otherway round it tries to open in Excel 2003. Which i am expecting to open on Excel 2007.

- Prasanna