x64 version of MS Office

Has MS had anything to say about when they will have an x64 based version of Office?

 

well, I'm running MS Office 2007 on vista 64bit and it works fine.....

 

Yeah sure it runs on Vista 64 (and XP 64), I'm doing the same, but it is not native 64 bit. Big difference. I would think that Excel and Access in particular would benefit from being 64 bit native running on a 64 bit OS on systems with lots of memory.

 

ok, ya, you're right.

I was afraid you were asking something along those lines

Sorry..........

 

They havent coded an x64 version of office yet but im sure they will soon.

Large Excel and Access database files will gain from it. Probably wont be a significant gain though..

 

As I sit here waiting 5 min for Excel to update my sheet every time I add a new column to this beast of a worksheet I have, on a system with 4GB and a T9300... I'm thinking that 64bit native code would make a noticeable difference.

 

Wow, that must be one hell of a worksheet to take that long on a system like that.

 

Yeah, this one is over 30MB now (in .xlsx format)... filled with conditional equations (sumif, countif, vlookup) referencing tables 100x100,000 in size.

 

I'm sure new developments of most programs will be native to x64 in the future . . . it'll be a year or so, though.

 

Ha! That's what they have been saying for years now... You would think that MS would have been leading the charge. They should have taken the opportunity and initiative with Vista to move forward and go 64bit only.

 

I'm sure Office 13 or 14 will have a 64bit native version .

The problem for Office 12 was when it was released. It was before Vista was released and XP x64 had almost no users due to the huge amount of problems it had. With Vista x64 out and gaining traction I think they'll have time to go back and rethink it.

Though that's just speculation on timeframes as I'm not sure what it will take to recompile Office 64bit. If it is a lot of code redoing it might not come until Office 14 or later once MS has time to get the "ribbon" rolled out to every Office application.

 

I wouldn't put any money on any version before 15

 

the demand isnt large enough. the normal 32bit office does the job for most people

 

Yeah, I know... but I find it odd that the hardware side of the market and the software side of the market seem to have been reading completely different tea leaves... Intel and AMD seemed to think it was imperative to move to 64 bit years ago

 

And, as I sit here watching Excel maxing out one core processor while the other sits idle half the time, it points to how long we probably have to go to get good 64 bit software... multi-core processor capacity (if you include hyper-threading) goes back even longer than 64 bit processors (I think??) and yet software still doesn't seem to really exploit that capability

 

The hardware market always moves faster than the software market. After all, it is easier for the hardware guys than it is for us software developers to roll out new stuff. We have to learn how to use their new stuff before we can exploit it. All takes time...

Multi-Threading is not as easy as the hardware guys make it seem. I don't know the work Excel is doing in your case, but not all math operations can happen in parallel. Some can, but not all. And if it can't you can't split the task out to another core.

A very simple example would be this basic formula

B = C(3-A*C)
D = A/(B+C)

You can't get D without waiting for the operation in the parentasis to complete for B...

That's a basic example I crafted in 30 seconds so it might have flaws, but you get the basic idea.

 

It seems to do well multi-threading on calculations... It seems when it is opening large files that the code isn't as well optimized for using the most of the processing power available