I suppose OOXML transitional support will be in there. Maybe Office 2024 we might get strict support.

Office 2K7 SP1? Errrrr..... no. Office 2K7? Errrrr.... no.

I imagine the "design" of 2K7 went like:

Punter: "This Excel thing. It doesn't have enough rows!"

MS: "It has 65,536 rows. Per sheet. And you can have lots of sheets. How many rows do you want, exactly?"

Punter: "It's not enough for mah spreadsheet!!! Ah need a MEEEELEEON ROWS!!"

MS: "Hmm. How's 1,048,576 rows? It's a nicer number."

Punter: "Can I put convoluted variable VLOOKUP formulae nested in multiple IF statements in EVERY SINGLE ONE???"

MS: "Yeah, sure. You *could* do that... but..."

Punter: "YES!!!! GIMME!!!!"

(one spreadsheet "design" later)

PC: *fizzle*.....*whirrrrr*.....*clickclickclick*.....*pop*

Paris. Because I bet she wants a million rows.

erm, Paris just because I want too see her try and do a million calculations.

I installed Office 2007 Enterprise on my machine about 2 months ago and when I went to windows updates a day later to see what updated were available since I saw the little yellow shield by my clock saw that Office SP1 was the one flagged and the only one flagged as being available. So how is this just now coming automatic? Not to mention I have also updated customers machines without having to manually download anything for it.

Actually, the enhancement to allow >65536 rows is useful for business processes.

We use spreadsheets to migrate customer data from their old finance system when they purchase the software we write - if you saw the accounts of most mid to large companies, the number of transactions is not an insignificant amount - being able to migrate the data in one go, rather than having to subset the information into lots of smaller imports will be a time saver for us and will remove the risk of accidentally migrating the same transaction twice.

In fact we have also recently had a modification enhancement request from one of our customers to develop our application to use the new xlsx format as the amount of data they wish to export from their software is now exceeding the row limit of the xls format. This information is not physically read/processed by the user, but is often used to integrate data between multiple software packages by extracting from one package and importing into the other.

Don't insinuate all "punters" are idiots because we need or want the scope of our software increased - there are people out there doing much more complex tasks with spreadsheets than just compiling their ratings of their favourite pr0n sites.

Migrating databases isn't the only reason for wanting more than 65536 rows.

I once spent a summer investigating the use of compressed air at a big industrial plant. As part of that, I used huge amounts of data from a datalogging system to determine the overall use of the air and monitor it over time.

65536 rows is only 45 days of data at 1-minute intervals.

I ended up having to do a lot of number-crunching across multiple sheets and workbooks to condense the data down to amounts that Excel could handle.

(And yes - Round-Robin tool would have been better. But I didn't have access to that then)

People aren't avoiding Office 2007 because it's buggy -- I hadn't even heard about that. People are avoiding it because:

a) Office <something older> is good enough.

b) Already have OpenOffice. Why spend $$$ for something else?

c) Ideologically opposed to OOXML and/or Microsoft.

d) That crap non-menu bar. Microsoft and fans' response is generally along the lines of "Oh you're stupid", "You have to learn how to use it", "It's the wave of the future get used to it". Well, having little nearly-identical-looking blobs (a.k.a. icons) instead of text doesn't do it for me, and I know many like me. If Microsoft's Office team doesn't wish to accomodate people like me, then fine, I won't use Office.

e) No Linux version. I wonder how many people Microsoft *assumes* are running Windows (due to sales figures from all those preloaded PCs) really aren't. They're NEVER going to get Office 2007 since it's not available for them.

For me, it's mostly b, d, and e. But c applies too -- I don't like Microsoft's behavior and avoid sending them money when possible.