Is Excel 2016 technically better than Excel 2010?

[hershmab]

The reason I am asking is because I am having one large and severe technical problem with Excel 2010 that many Excel gurus have not been able to help with and that Microsoft Excel support have not been able to diagnose, let alone solve.

Over the past 10 years or so I have created a number of Excel applications for accounting and financial purposes. They have a lot of cross-references and formulas, including much VBA code that I have written myself as subroutines and user-defined functions. Several of the applications that are most important to me have, in the last year or so, suffered from a persistent tendency to stop with the "Excel is not responding" message and often never complete properly, however long I wait.

I and the people I have consulted cannot find the reason for this - it seems to be something in the Excel 2010 code that is going wrong, not in the applications themselves. I have used Microsoft's OffCat tool to analyse the relevant workbook and come up with only one possible cause: input data often comes from copying and pasting online bank account tables that can include hidden and irrelevant links which Excel interprets as graphics, ie. Shapes. But even when I have eliminated these Shapes, the applications continue not to respond, particularly when closing and automatically saving the workbooks.

So my question comes down to this: is Excel 2016 likely to be any better at diagnosing and correcting such problems than Excel 2010?

 

[Norie]

Are you sure it's Excel that's the problem and not the data and/or the method(s) being used to import the data into Excel?

 

[Jonmo1]

Better is a very subjective term, subject to opinion.

However, given the problem you believe to be the cause of your issue.

input data often comes from copying and pasting online bank account tables that can include hidden and irrelevant links which Excel interprets as graphics, ie. Shapes.

I don't think 2016 would handle that any differently than 2010.

I can think of one surefire way to find out though.
Try it.
You can get a Free Trial of Office365

 

[hershmab]

Are you sure it's Excel that's the problem and not the data and/or the method(s) being used to import the data into Excel?

As for the data - I am sure that copy/paste does cause some of the problem. But I can, and have, eliminated that, and yet the not responding still occurs! Most of the data is imported from .CSV files downloaded from the web source. That can be visually checked and none of it seems to be a cause. My own VBA code I can trace and it does not obviously cause any problems. That leaves nothing else that cannot be checked - except the Excel 2010 system itself. So in my mind there is no other avenue to try other than a different version of Excel.

So I will follow Jonmo1's suggestion of getting a free trial of Office365.

 

[Smitty]

Have you tried importing the data (Data-->Get External Data) instead of copy/paste? Copy/Paste can easily cause issues, where the GED methods are designed for importing large data sets.

If you do go the O365 route that Jon suggested, I'd take a look at PowerQuery to import the data - That's the future of the Get External Data experience.

HTH,

 

[hershmab]

Have you tried importing the data (Data-->Get External Data) instead of copy/paste? Copy/Paste can easily cause issues, where the GED methods are designed for importing large data sets.

If you do go the O365 route that Jon suggested, I'd take a look at PowerQuery to import the data - That's the future of the Get External Data experience.

HTH,

The data-sets are quite small - less than 100 rows each - and come from secure password-protected web pages. Will GED or PowerQuery be able to access them?

At the moment I have replaced cut/paste methods by downloading pdfs (where available) and converting them to Excel with proprietary software - which does not work very well AND requires some Excel post-processing.

 

[Smitty]

You can pull from web pages, but passing the password could be an issue. I'd give it a shot and see what happens.

 

[hershmab]

You can pull from web pages, but passing the password could be an issue. I'd give it a shot and see what happens.

Thanks, I will.

 

[FDibbins]

As for the data - I am sure that copy/paste does cause some of the problem. But I can, and have, eliminated that,

Are you 100% certain of that? Sometimes you get "invisible" characters (like non-breaking space) , that you cant see, and functions like TRIM() don't touch
check for Char(160)

 

[hershmab]

Are you 100% certain of that? Sometimes you get "invisible" characters (like non-breaking space) , that you cant see, and functions like TRIM() don't touch
check for Char(160)

Thanks, but I am (reasonably) certain that I have dealt with that.