The Microsoft Office 2010 system is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The 64-bit version enables you to work with much larger sets of data. This need is especially true when working with large numbers in Microsoft Excel 2010. With the introduction of the new 64-bit version of Microsoft Office 2010, a new version of Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), known as Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications 7.0 (VBA 7), is being released to work with both 32-bit and 64-bit applications.
It is important to note that the changes addressed in this article apply only to the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office 2010. Using the 32-bit version of Office 2010 enables you to use solutions built in previous versions of Microsoft Office without modification. Note In a default installation of Office 2010, the 32-bit version is installed, even on 64-bit systems. You must explicitly select the Office 2010 64-bit version installation option. In VBA 7, you must update existing Windows Application Programming Interface (API) statements ( Declare statements) to work with the 64-bit version.
Bink Set Soundtrack 8. Additionally, you must update address pointers and display window handles in user-defined types that are used by these statements. This is discussed in more detail in this article as well as compatibility issues between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office 2010 and suggested solutions. Applications built with the 64-bit version of Office 2010 can reference larger address spaces, and therefore provide the opportunity to use more physical memory than ever, potentially reducing the overhead spent moving data in and out of physical memory. In addition to referring to specific locations (also known as pointers) in physical memory that an application uses to store data or to store programming instructions, you can also use addresses to reference display window identifiers (known as handles). Depending on whether you are using a 32-bit or 64-bit system determines the size (in bytes) of the pointer or handle. There are two fundamental issues when you run existing solutions with the 64-bit version of Office 2010: • Native 64-bit processes in Office 2010 cannot load 32-bit binaries. This is expected to be a common issue when you have existing Microsoft ActiveX controls and existing add-ins, • VBA previously did not have a pointer data type and because of this, developers used 32-bit variables to store pointers and handles.
These variables now truncate 64-bit values returned by API calls when using Declare statements. VBA 7 is a new code base, replacing the earlier version of VBA. VBA 7 exists for both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office 2010. It provides two conditional compilation constants: VBA7 and Win64. The VBA7 constant helps ensure the backward compatibility of your code by testing whether your application is using VBA 7 or the previous version of VBA. The Win64 constant is used to test whether code is running as 32-bit or as 64-bit. Both of these compilation constants are demonstrated later in this article.