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Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Excel 2010 loading Excel 2011 file

Damn you, Microsoft. It's 2013, why does your software still operate as though it was built to cause frustration?

I've been keeping extensive project notes in Excel 2011. Normally I use Google Docs, but I wanted to take advantage of the more sophisticated row and column formatting options in Excel 2011.

This week I shared the location of the file with a co-worker. He opened the file, found the whole project blank (like, without even a single worksheet) and just figured I hadn't added any notes yet.

Today we learned that Excel 2010 didn't like opening the file that was made in Excel 2011. I tried saving it in old-fashioned .xls format. He still couldn't open the file. I was able to open it in Excel 2007, but even after saving it as both .xlsx and .xls, it still didn't open.

A little while after I'd given up trying he noticed that Excel 2010 had tried to pop up a window with the spreadsheet off screen. Like, as though he were running a virtual desktop, even though he isn't. And apparently Excel 2010 doesn't have a 'cascade window' menu item any more, so he had to do all sorts of contortions to get the spreadsheet to appear.

Microsoft, man, I sure hate you sometimes.

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