A new school year, crisp mornings, mist rising off the fields as the dawn chorus tweets merrily, and - oh joy - traffic jams on the M1 and problems with the sales spreadsheet again. As you may recall (or possibly not unless you've been paying close attention to my blog for the last 18 months) the sales spreadsheet is a baroque monstrosity of visual basic macros and odbc links to an encrypted price list database, and against all odds it has been running without any problems since the last major update at the start of the year. I got complaints that spreadsheets sent from the sales team in Leeds were crashing with weird and wonderful errors. I spent some time tracing the problem and eventually realised that the sales team in Leeds all have new laptops with Office 2003 installed and every time they saved the spreadsheet it included a reference to the latest version of the Word object library, thus rendering the spreadsheet unusable by anybody with an earlier version of Office.
I found a copy of Office 2003 to play with but I couldn't see an easy way to stop the program saving with the reference file included. Of course, you can go into the VB references screen and remove it from the list, but this is the sales team we are talking about here ... Faced with either downgrading all of the Office 2003 installations or upgrading everybody in the company from XP to 2003 I tried just copying the object file and installing it in the office program folder - result!
Metaphorically buffs nails on an imaginary lapel ... :-)
1 comment:
Ooo, very clever. See? there is a reason why I am just a user, and that is I never would have thought of it.
Clever, indeed.
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