14 DAY TRIAL // Months before Office 2010 will hit the general availability deadline, Microsoft is taking the necessary measures to streamline the adoption of the next iteration of its productivity suite. In this regard, the Redmond company is offering a free tool to customers eyeing a migration to Office 2010 the coming years, designed to verify whether legacy applications developed for older versions of Office will play nice with the next generation of the product. The Beta release of the Compatibility Inspector can be grabbed via the Microsoft Download Center, and will enable customers to assess legacy code built for Office against the Office 2010 object model. The end purpose of the tool is to help users sniff out any possible code issues.
“The Microsoft Office 2010 Compatibility Inspector compares existing (legacy) code against the Office 2010 object model by using a text search for known properties and methods that have changed. You can run the tool against specific projects. You also have the option to mark those areas in the code where text search has identified a possible object model match. The comment will include description of what was found along with possible remediation link to online content or help,” the Redmond company stated.
Microsoft released the first public development milestone of Office 2010 the past month. At this point in time Office 2010 Beta 14.0.4536.1000 continues to be available for download, and it’s nothing short than a page out of the best practices migration manual for customers looking to adopt the new productivity suite to already deploy the Beta in testing environments and start planning for the upgrade. The Compatibility Inspector will certainly help them identify issues with code written for Office 97, Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003 and the 2007 Office system with Office 2010.
“The tool integrates with both Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications 7.0 (VBA 7) and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. It includes a basic scanner where definitions and remediation links are updated from a central online location. It also generates a summary report and a details report. The summary includes the total lines of code scanned as well as total lines identified as potential candidates for object model changes. The details report includes the module name, line number, and links to remediation for each identified issue along with color-coded flags for impact guidance,” Microsoft added.
Office 2010 Tool: Compatibility Inspector is available for download here. Office 2010 Beta 14.0.4536.1000 is available for download here.