Stability of Excel 2003 v Excel 2007 and Xcelsius

Hello all

We're rather stuck in the dark ages here and still on a corpoate level use Excel 2003. We have recently made Excel 2007 available to users and I'd like to know the experience of other users.

We currently use Xcelsius SP1 on both windows XP and virtualised WIndows 7 desktops, neither of which is better than the other. We will be moving to SP5 in the coming weeks.

In Excel 2003, we see regularly the following symptoms

• Excel will crash and you lose your work since last save
• Xcelsius will appear to crash and you are left with an orphaned invisible EXCEL.exe process you have to kill by hand to get Xcelsius working again
• Once in a while you get an OLE automation error, or Xcelsius takes so long to do something that the Excel instance starts complaining. Waiting usually works but sometimes you end up with one of the above two options.

I want to be able to recommend SP5 and a move to Excel 2007 in a bid to improve stability, but I have no grounds to base this on.

My questions are these:

Do other users see this kind of issue still with Excel 2007?

Has anyone moved from Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 and did they see an improvement in stability?

Same question for moving up the Xcelsius service packs?

Thanks in advance

Richard