office 2010 tips and tricks thursdays – use two versions of excel (and start saving disk space)

i haven’t used office 2003 for a while, but this evening i installed it for a demo environment on windows 7.  then i installed office 2010 click-to-run (a virtualized second copy of office built upon the same application virtualization technology we use in app-v) on the same computer (i’ve been dogfooding it for a while virtualized along with a traditionally installed version).  now i have the ability to work on both at the same time

the really great thing about running the older with the new is you can truly compare and contrast between the two – take for instance the file format introduced with office 2007 – this demo file is 4.5 mb in the xls format.  in the office 2007/2010 xlsx format, it’s only 1.25 mb – that’s a pretty significant storage savings if you have a bunch of spreadsheets!

there are a number of benefits to this approach – let’s say i’ve got an add in that only works in excel 2003 – i still have access to excel 2003!  let’s say i want to work with a gigantic amount of data – excel 2010 supports over a million rows compared to excel 2003’s 65536

more rows means more data can be crunched in 2010 (and there will also be a 64 bit version available!)

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  peter - i would imagine you have seen click-to-run for office 2010.  the first thing it brings down to the computer is an app-v like program (click-to-run manager) and then streams the rest of the suite to your computer.