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Excel 2003 benefits/consequences
67-17454
Thanks for your question. It made me think about issues involved with my uploading a modified program.
The BENEFITS: For this finished application, I doubt there are any benefits of using the Excel 2003 code in place of the Excel 2000 code. The code in question only has to find one record in the weekly COT report. For a developer who would like to extend the data read capabilities of future versions of this workbook, the newer commands might be more efficient and flexible. Future development might address the issue of the unavailability of previous weekly reports after the issue of a new COT report. At the same time that the weekly report is issued an annual report is updated in the same format. The data read capabilities could be extended to process this annual report thus eliminating the need to find or recreate the weekly reports to update the data contained in the COT workbook.
The issue is about compatibility. Since 1997 macros for Excel (and the other Office products) have been written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Periodically VBA is upgraded with new capabilities. From the programmer’s notes on the “Start Here” sheet it is apparent that he originally wrote the macros with the version of VBA which comes with Excel 2003. Some users were experiencing problems so the programmer added code that is compatible with earlier versions of VBA. He left the newer VBA code in place but set remark apostrophes in front of it to disable it.
The CONSEQUENCES: As I was going through the code to understand it, I changed my macro to use the newer version. Does this do anything better or faster? I doubt it. Should I have changed the macro to run with the newer commands? Probably not. The programmer had effectively addressed the issue of backward compatibility and probably left the new code in place as a courtesy to developers and others who might like to see the difference. By changing to the newer commands and uploading my modified workbook, I subverted his work. For users of Excel 2003 the new commands are fine but for someone with a previous version of Excel who downloads my workbook I have created an unnecessary problem.
At least at the time I did the upload I was aware enough to note the changes but I did not think it through or I would have changed the code back to the original. To make amends I am attaching the workbook with the original code and the COT records through May 9, 2006.
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