Judas

I've been sitting here since they launched office 2010 knowing that on the retail disk... it comes with both 32bit default install and x64 alternative install..

And i've been sitting on the fence of if i should install the x64 version yet or not..

I have installed it on a few machines simply because well most of the issues that could potentially show up would be due to backward capability or features and plugins... but those machines are first time use...

Just curious what others think on this...

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Veridian3

From what I remember, there are not a huge amount of benefits from 64bit office. You can open larger spreadsheets etc but home users probably wont see any real difference... Craig uses the x64 version I think.

Takaharu

From my findings...

64-bit pro
> You can work with spreadsheets that are over 2GB in size and the potential is there to work with many more rows.
> The same serial number works with 32-bit and 64-bit so you might as well install it
> You can view itemised billing of a call centre that the phone provider has provided in CSV format
> It opens faster

64-bit con
> You need a 64-bit version of Windows.

32-bit pro
> You can run it without a 64-bit version of Windows.
> You learn to use databases rather than creating stupidly-large spreadsheets.

32-bit con
> Whatever 64-bit has as a pro, inverted.

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Judas

yeah but i was reading that most plugins and active x controls as well as countless other features that would generally straight out work CAN NOT work with x64 due to requiring their converters and such to be x64 native in the office...

Now what i've seen overall on those machines i've installed x64 on.. that majority of all the users that use it, don't have a problem, because not many home users get into the nitty gritty details..

I do however notice that the x64 generally seems to be more responcive/faster..... even though it loads fast already... it just seems a little snappier... kinda like ie x64 seems to just be a little snappier too.

I think for all home application though i'm going to install the x64 version... Might even help out in terms of potential virus infections too due to as i understand it and have read, many of the viruses will not work in the x64 version due to not working "properly" with it similare to that of anything else that is x64.

For businesses though i'll stick to the 32bit for the time being just so they don't have any issues.

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blibbax

I abandoned MS Office when they switched to the ribbon format in 2007. I just found it incredibly unintuitive, which isn's something I'd normally say of any other MS software. Open Office works well though, and I still have an installation of MS Office 2000 on this PC too :P

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Takaharu

Oddly enough, despite the age of Office 2007 we've had a few complaints from clients of my workplace saying that they can't open Office 2007 documents so staff members have had to re-save and re-send their work.
Keeping Office up to date is pointless for most people and very expensive so I can understand why they don't go for Office 2007/2010 but can't they at least get the free compatibility pack or respective viewers to be able to read the files?

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blibbax

Given that Open Office can open .docx files, and can save as any file type you can imagine, it's not hard to convert without using expensive software if you really want to.

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Takaharu

It can finally open Docx? Wow, took its time.
For work use, it's Office hands-down for me (we use Exchange for one thing, which Outlook excels at, despite not being the only compatible e-mail client).
For home use, I'd quite happily recommend Open Office as it has a few smaller features that really come in handy. For example, closing down a word-processed document, shutting down your computer then when you open up the file next, it places the cursor back in the same place that you left it. Ingenious in its simplicity; I love stuff like that.

Yeah, I'm gonna go with not a lot of point in installing 64-bit Office, though there's no real reason why not to. Flip a coin

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blibbax

This has been the case for a while now :P

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CJLMTLCA

I'm running 64bit now coming off of 2003. No problems so far. Don't notice any speed differences. I don't remember how it ran on XP, but i do remember that on Vista, because of prefetch i imagine, it opened instantaneously, as it does now on 7 and the biggest excel file i have is around 80k, so not like i was suffering on 32bit.

Ribbon is nice and once i memorize everything, it will go faster but still not as fast as 2003. Now have to click twice for some actions that previously took one click.

I did re-save all my files to the new x format. Alot of documents needed updating anyway, so i'm up to date in my office files.

Didn't even think if 64bit was going to be a problem. Have a 64bit CPU, OS, a multitude of other apps, so no point in not going 64bit.

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