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

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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

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