Hi Mark,

I don't know if it MS' advice, but it is certainly mine, and I have other
luminaries express the same opinion.

As far as I am aware, it is very difficult to get a comprehensive set of
changes, it is compiled by experience and knowledge sharing. This makes it a
difficult and frustrating to be able to identify backwards in advance of
doing the work. That is why it is much simpler to develop with the LCD.

I'll not get into a dialogue of criticism re MS, it's too easy. I would just
add that the product set is vast, and the market requires new and enhanced
product so rapidly, often documentation suffers, and so (in some ways) it is
understandable. We are a much smaller group, but have the same problem.


As to forcing upgrades, I read somewhere that Office 97 is still the most
used version of Office.

--

HTH

Bob Phillips
... looking out across Poole Harbour to the Purbecks
(remove nothere from the email address if mailing direct)

"Mark" wrote in message
...
Hi Bob

Well, your right of course. But changing your development platform on the
other hand is not the best idea. I am really surpriced if it turns out
that
this should be Microsofts advice on the back compatibility issue.

But seeing it from Microsofts side, there is a point in downplaying the
compatibility information regarding the Office XP. In this way they can be
sure that new code will only run on the newest versions of Office and thus
forcing people to upgrade their Office installation. If this is true, then
this kind of buisness tactics is unethical to say the least.

Microsoft talks about entering in a dialog with its developers around the
world. Maybe this is a good place to start. Make some better documentation
from which the compatibility issues are crystal clear.

Regards
Mark



"Bob Phillips" wrote in message
...
Mark,

Develop your code on the lowest platform it will deployed upon and you
should not have any problems.

--

HTH

Bob Phillips
... looking out across Poole Harbour to the Purbecks
(remove nothere from the email address if mailing direct)

"Mark" wrote in message
...
Hi NG

I am writting a rather large program in Excel using VBA. Before my
code
gets
too big, I want to deal with the back compatibility issues.

I am using WinXP an office XP Pro and my program works for this target
platform. But if i shift platfor e.g. WinXP with office XP then my
code
breaks. This is frustrating to say the least.

When i look in the helpfiles i can not immediately see which version
of
office this or that object/method/parameter works. Is there a way to
see
it?
is there perhaps a small check i can use to see on which versions of
office
my VBA program will run?

I have a great amount of positive experiance with Java and one of the
things
i like about it is its excellent documentation. For each object in
Java
one
can see the "SINCE" tag to see from which version of the virtual
machine
the
object was included in the API. Does VBA have something similar?

Regards
Mark