Professional Excel Development [Electronic resources] : The Definitive Guide to Developing Applications Using Microsoft® Excel and VBA® نسخه متنی

Supported Versions

When developing an Excel application for a client, their upgrade policy will usually determine which version of Excel we must use; very few clients will agree to upgrade their desktops just so we can develop using the latest version, unless there is a compelling business requirement that can only be satisfied by using features that the latest version introduces. There is so little difference between Excel 2000 and Excel 2003 that it is hard to imagine such a business requirement. An extremely unscientific poll (based on postings to the Microsoft support newsgroups) seems to indicate the following approximate usage for each version:

There were a number of significant changes between Excel 97 and Excel 2000 for the application developer, including the switch from VBA5 to VBA6 and the introduction of modeless userforms, interfaces, COM Add-ins and support for ADO. We have therefore decided to use Excel 2000 as our lowest supported version and development platform, with our applications tested in the later versions. Most of the concepts detailed in this book apply equally to Excel 97, but our example timesheet application uses features Excel 97 does not support. Whenever we discuss a feature supported only in the later versions (such as XML import/export and VB.Net integration in Excel 2003), we state which version(s) can be used.