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DeltaV Excel Add-In

Hi All,

Anyone has any experience with MS Office 365 and DeltaV Excel Add-In for Bulk editing? Is it compatible to use it with Excel 365 version or do you need to stick with a desktop copy of Excel for the moment?

Thanks,

8 Replies

  • Office 365 is basically Office 2016 as of today. Is there a compatibility matrix published by Emerson? It might show which Office is OK to use for which DeltaV release.
  • In reply to Lun.Raznik:

    They usually list the compatible version of office in the release notes for each version, 13.3 shows Office 2013 SP1 32-bit (regardless of 32 or 64-bit OS) as the supported version. I know that the Emerson add-in's never work on 64-bit versions of office.
  • In reply to chessley:

    Experience tells me that latest Office versions and DeltaV are generally compatible. But using a version of Office not listed in release notes may mean you will not get support. By the way, are you using DeltaV 13.3?
  • If you have Gaurdian Support, they will have that information and there could be a KBA specific to your DeltaV version as well. I do recommend sticking with the tested version of EXCEL that was tested for your DeltaV indicated in the release note. The reason I am saying that is that Emerson don't have control over MS Office product developement and releases. If they did not make any code changes to the EXCEL from the supported version and the version you are looking at, then it will work. If there are code changes to EXCEL, you probably will run into unwanted issue. Why are you wanting to upgrade to MS Office 365?
  • In reply to Lun.Raznik:

    I looked into this recently and found an article on Micorsoft's site discussing the merits of 32 bit vs 64 bit versions of Office. They listed some specific technical reasons that would require the 64 bit version, but if none of these were required, they recommended using the 32 bit version. So even if you have installed a 64 bit OS (available in v12.3 and above), you should stay with the 32 bit version of Office/Excel. I believe this is what is currently marked as compatible in the release notes.

    The other issue is being able to purchase licensing for an older version of Office. The article explained that the Office licenses would support the previous version, so if you have the new license, you can obtain the older version software and install it. Some software licensing will support more than one version back, but I don't have those details anymore.

    Office 365 uses a rental arrangement and must be renewed every year. I would prefer to license Excel once and only deal with potential changes when the DCS updates the OS. This happens fare less frequently than an annual license rental.

    Andre Dicaire

  • We have Office 365 (2016) at our company, and I have used the Excel Add-In for bulk editing without issue.
  • In reply to dave_marshall:

    Thanks all for the great discussion.

    I was just curious to find out if anyone had any experience with the Excel Add-In for Bulk editing with Office 365. Our IT machines (Not DeltaV machines) are going to be getting an upgrade to Office 365 some time in near future.

    Thanks.
  • In reply to mastermadhawa:

    We ran into a problem using this add in with the Office 365 64 bit Excel client but managed to correct it by tracking down the error and updating the exposed aspects of the plugin.

    I would never expect the web-based excel client to work with the add in, as the original thread inquires, mainly because that client is very limited and vba in general doesn't seem to have a future in the cloud.

    Regarding licensing of office products, the move to 365 is well under way by many small and mid sized companies because it affords a more accessible pricing model (i.e. lower cost of entry, less internal infrastructure etc.)

    With so many platforms out there, stitching operational and business IT needs together will be daunting unless highly interoperable standards are chosen for development.

    Remember when every web based application for business had to be used on Internet Explorer (or particular versions of IE) ? Large companies would be stuck at IE 8 because of legacy application compatibility, but then modern HTML 5 compliant applications would not work with the non-compliant IE (which is why the last few huge clients I worked for had Chrome installs as part of their base business laptop, in addition to the ancient IE version).
    Leveraging the ubiquity and proliferation of Office products instead of writing engineering clients from scratch is a great idea. The pace of change even with mainstays like Microsoft isn't going to slow down, however.