Vole prepares Office in 32-bit and 64-bit flavours

You fail to mention that Office 2007 had specific 64bit threaded support in its core files which are installed upon OS detection.

That's nice for them. But since discovering OpenOffice, we shall be sticking with that. As, strangely, it manages to produce all the tables, documents, charts, equations, presentations and reports that are needed, without a hitch. And without been gouged another few overblown thousand, for the privilege.

Since 64-bit code takes up more memory and is usually slower for most code, why not just produce a single 32-bit version, I mean who would be mad enough to produce a 3gb spreadsheet?

I can see the need for 64-bit with access, but the rest of the suite simply does not need it.

64 bit windows can't run 32-bit code without 32 bit emulation support. All that memory you're trying to save by going with 32 bit only? Yeah that disappears into a WOW64 session along with alot of your system performance.
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A native 64 bit app won't need the 32-bit emu overhead and will actually consume LESS memory in Win64 environment.
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I learned this the hard way when my 64 bit Win2k3 server was 10 times slower than the OLDER hardware running the same apps in 32 bit Win2k3.

So they will just switch the 64bit flag in the Office compiler, so what.

What I really like to know is if they'll come with another revolutionary menu system and another "ISO standard" file format.

For the above poster, I'd like to remark that OpenOffice can't open any complex Office document. Just try textboxes inside drawings inside tables or something. And Google Documents can't even handle page breaks properly.

Open Office is great yes, but has to be admired for being free and not much else. When I have a 5MB spreadsheet full of pivots what are Sun Microsystems going to do to help me ?

And as for the WOW64 argument and 3GB spreadhseet - I assume the user has a 32 bit system and envy of the power of the extra integer of 2!

Can't wait to be able to use 16PB of RAM to open a Word document. How about something useful like ODF instead.

So jonathan and others don't see the point of 64-bit Excel, well good for them.

As someone who daily uses spreadsheets of tens of MB (little ones) to the odd of hundreds of MB (large ones), I welcome this with open arms ... almost much as I did the addition of multi-threading in Excel 2007, which is a feature that saves me and my colleagues hours every day. Quad-core PC and Excel is four times faster, and Octo-core and its eight times faster; so a spreadsheet that takes an hour to calculate on a single core takes a mere 7.5 mins on an 8-core. :)

However, my Vista 64-bit PC has many gigs of RAM that aren't used by Excel when I wish they were. So can Microsoft please sort out the memory management of the next Excel so that I can use pivot tables to my hearts content with my very large data sets?

I see some are complaining that 64-bit code is slower and even more bloated than 32-bit code.

I think this is a Windows limitation, because the 64-bit APIs were designed to make it easy to recompile code written for Win32, instead of taking proper advantage of 64-bit operations

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/05/microsoft-learn-from-apple-II.ars/3

Linux has been available native on various 64-bit platforms for over a decade, so these sorts of issues don't arise there.