A Customer of ours has mainly Office from 97 to 2003. When he uses worksheets
in 2007 (in Vista or XP), it comes painfully slow either opening or working
(eg to go from one cell to another), it keeps saying the program is not
responding. Even if they are converted to .xlsx the problem is the same.
These are generally simple worksheets of 2 or 3 pages with some conditional
formatting (eg to compare the quotations from differente suppliers).
I've tried to open 97-2003 files in OpenOffice and to overwrite them in
97-2003 and 2 things happen: the file decreased dramatically its size (eg
from 9,5Mb to 1,5Mb or from 1,5Mb to 87Kb) and if they use them in 2007 they
have a normal behavior without having lost any kind of functionality.
A colleague told me that was due to the fact that Excel saves all styles
within the file. But I'd like to hear some suggestions as well as some advice
in order to take the best of 2007 without having to use a 3rd party software.
Or even if there is any application that can do some kind of cleanup of .xls
files as it is done by OO.
BTW I've read several articles on how to improve Excel 2007 before writing
this down (eg related to calculating, formatting and so on).