I recently purchased an HP computer which has Microsoft
XP installed. I have considerable information stored
from my old computer which are Excel spreadsheets in
the .xls format. I am only able to read these files when
I open them and not work within or save changes in them.
When I contacted HP, they informed me that I needed to
separately purchase an Excel program that allowed me to
work within these files. I'm having a real problem
having spent $2,000 on a new system and then being told
that I have to spend more in order to access my files.
Are there any alternatives?

Why Microsoft ever thought that naming both a version of the operating
system and the Office suite "XP" (except that there was a corporate-wide
insanity that thought that "eXPerience" was somehow clever) is beyond
me. However, that's what they did. Windows XP has nothing to do with
Office XP - you can run Office XP in Windows 98 and Office 97 in Windows
XP (however, you can't run Office 98 in Windows 98, since Office 98 is a
Mac-only version).

One alternative to buying OfficeXP is to use OpenOffice:

http://openoffice.org

which is a free product that is still under development. It does a
great job for basic spreadsheets, but doesn't have the programmability
that XL does with VBA. It will both read and write XL-compatible files.

Gnumeric is also a very fine free spreadsheet application that runs on
Linux/Unix computers (including Macintosh). Linux is also free, of
course. It should be available for Windows whenever gtk2.0 is finalized.
Again, the programming is a bit different than XL's VBA, but it has the
advantage of getting more statistics actually correct (and I haven't yet
been able to make it return a negative value for RAND() as XL2003 does).



In article ,
"Tripp Smith" wrote:

I recently purchased an HP computer which has Microsoft
XP installed. I have considerable information stored
from my old computer which are Excel spreadsheets in
the .xls format. I am only able to read these files when
I open them and not work within or save changes in them.
When I contacted HP, they informed me that I needed to
separately purchase an Excel program that allowed me to
work within these files. I'm having a real problem
having spent $2,000 on a new system and then being told
that I have to spend more in order to access my files.
Are there any alternatives?

Windows is an operating system. It provides no software to work with Excel
files. If you want to work with Excel files, you need a copy of Excel. If
you owned a copy off Excel on your previous computer, you should be able to
install it on your new computer.

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

Tripp Smith wrote in message
...
I recently purchased an HP computer which has Microsoft
XP installed. I have considerable information stored
from my old computer which are Excel spreadsheets in
the .xls format. I am only able to read these files when
I open them and not work within or save changes in them.
When I contacted HP, they informed me that I needed to
separately purchase an Excel program that allowed me to
work within these files. I'm having a real problem
having spent $2,000 on a new system and then being told
that I have to spend more in order to access my files.
Are there any alternatives?

With regard to the suggestion by Tom Ogilvy that "if you owned a copy of Excel,
you should be able to install it on your new computer."

Because of the manner in which Office 2000 and Office XP (of which Excel is a
part) are activated, one is limited to the number of different computers these
packages can be installed on (typically 1, 2, or 3, depending on the version
purchased (academic, professional, etc).
If you've hit the limit and later replace one of the old computers by a new
one, you should call Microsoft's Activation Hotline at 1-888-571-2048 and
explain to them what's
happening, in which case they can supply a new activation code for the
replacement machine.

-- Dennis Eisen

Just to add --
In the US, Office 2000 didn't have a registration requirement except,
perhaps, the academic edition. If a full install of Office 2000 with SR1
were done, then I believe the registration requirement was added to that,
but not with application of SR1 to the original Office 2000 product.

http://www.microsoft.com/PressPass/p...8/regwizpr.asp

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy


DennisE wrote in message
...
With regard to the suggestion by Tom Ogilvy that "if you owned a copy of
Excel,
you should be able to install it on your new computer."

Because of the manner in which Office 2000 and Office XP (of which Excel
is a
part) are activated, one is limited to the number of different computers
these
packages can be installed on (typically 1, 2, or 3, depending on the
version
purchased (academic, professional, etc).
If you've hit the limit and later replace one of the old computers by a
new
one, you should call Microsoft's Activation Hotline at 1-888-571-2048 and
explain to them what's
happening, in which case they can supply a new activation code for the
replacement machine.

-- Dennis Eisen