Office 2010 users warned over file migration

Businesses users investing in the new Microsoft Office 2010 suite are being offered what is claimed to be the easy way to smooth migration worries from Office 2007.

Converter Technology has announced OfficeConverter 2010, a program that performs file discovery,  analysis and bulk file conversion for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access. While simple files created in older versions should present no problems for the new Office, more complex documents and spreadsheets can encounter a number of woes, the company said.
 
“If companies don’t plan their deployments correctly, file links will break, macros will go haywire, spreadsheet formulas will stop working, and revenue opportunities will be lost, to cite just a few potential problems,” said director of product development, Chip Bates.

Market hype or something buyers should watch out for?

According to the company, Office 2010 features enough changes to VBA (visual basic for applications) to cause problems with custom macros. Use of Office 2010 in a virtualised model could compound these VBA issues.

File extensions from older versions could also finally start to fail under the new post-doc file extension era, and Excel's revised cell addressing design could cause carefully-tended spreadsheets to fail.

Office 2010 also features a new 64-bit version aimed at unusually large spreadsheet. Here, data migration is essential, although it has to be said that 32-bit to 64-bit migration is at most a niche concern for all but the largest companies.

The program's DiscoverIT module works out which files need attention, while the ReportIT turns this data into reports that aid decision making by IT staff. SubmitIT can be used by individual company users to submit files for analysis and later retrieval. VBA issues are dealt with in an automated way by the OfficeConverter module with a hands-off success rate of 90 plus percent.

The program is available now with pricing and licensing available on request.