Office 365

[hudson888]

Does anyone know what the compatibility status for excel is between newer versions of office and NX?

Best Regards

Hudson

www.jamb.com.au

Nil Desperandum illegitimi non carborundum

 

[JohnRBaker]

According to the latest 'Release Notes', NX supports the 32-bit versions of Microsoft Excel 2003, 2007 and 2010. NX does not yet support the 64-bit version of Excel 2010.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[hudson888]

Thanks John,

I've been talking with the folks at Microsoft and they tell me that Office 365 Business Premium does include downloadable versions of their programs but that it is basically Office 2013.

If that isn't supported by NX then I'm lucky because I already have office 2010 and can do a custom install, but others may want to know this information. And if it turns out that the 32 bit version of excel 2013 differs very little from excel 2010 then it would be handy to know whether that can or will shortly be supported.


Best Regards

Hudson

www.jamb.com.au

Nil Desperandum illegitimi non carborundum

 

[JohnRBaker]

BTW Hudson, I see that you've been away for awhile. What have you been up to? Nothing good I hope ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[JohnRBaker]

An update on the status of Office 365 and Office 2013 relative to their use with NX.

OK, we've been working on this, but there are some issues. First, don't hold your breath waiting for support of Office 365 since this manifestation of Microsoft Office is a version which runs on 'the cloud' and as such will not be supported in any manner whatsoever, at least in terms of NX being able to leverage it when performing spreadsheet-based operations during a session of NX, such as defining a Part Family table, or utilizing the Modeling spreadsheet to edit and update a model, etc.

Now as for Office 2013, a more normal 'installed' version of the software, we are working on getting it to work with future versions of NX, but Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, has made major changes to both the way Excel works and how the toolkit, used by vendors such as Siemens PLM when integrating their applications, is utilized. And while it is going to require us to make changes to the way we link Excel to NX, we've got it working, but not without some serious caveats, due in part to way Excel 2013 behaves when it has a document open. The biggest issue is that prior to Excel 2013, if you had more than one Excel document opened on the deskstop they were treated as separate images, each running in their own window. That meant that when NX launched a session of Excel using one of the spreadsheet-based functions mentioned above, there was no problems since whatever was happening was its own isolated session.

However, starting with Excel 2013 when a document is opened, IF there's another Excel document already open on the desktop, this second document will be included in the first session as just another 'tab' sharing a common window and ribbon bar. That's all well and good if we're talking about two or more normal spreadsheet documents being opened at once, but when an application launches an Excel session, as we do with NX, and more importantly, this application modifies/extends/adds-to the Excel user interface, which we do when NX launches a spreadsheet, this can potentially cause all sorts of issues since the original document that had been opened before NX tried to open a document would know nothing about any additional options that were added to or even potentially removed from the Excel ribbon interface (BTW, NX is not the only product with this issue as other vendors who also add-to/modify the Excel Ribbon when they launch their spreadsheet-based functions are facing the same problems as we are).

Anyway, to make a long stort short, at least until Microsoft addresses this issue for 3rd party vendors, we're going to have to limit Excel to having only one session open at a time when using any NX spreadsheet-based functions. What this means it that if we detect a session of Excel already running when you launch one of the spreadsheet-based functions, a warning will pop-up saying that the function is not available until the current session of Excel is closed, meaning that you'll have to exit that session of Excel before you can retry the NX function. Now there are a few other minor caveats when using the Excel 2013 and NX, but this is the big one.

Now as to when and which versions of NX will we certify to work with Office 2013, well the current plan is to only conditionally support (with a clear understanding of what the caveats are) Excel 2013 with NX 8.5.3 and NX 9.0. There will we be no effort made to support any other legacy versions of NX. And as we work with Microsoft to resolve the toolkit issues, we will update the status as progress is made, but people should expect that our support will be less than unconditional for some time to come as we have no firm idea as to when and if the Microsoft toolkit issues will be addressed. Note that these changes to NX to accommodate Excel 2013 will have no impact on the level of support for the current versions of Microsoft Office, as outlined in my earlier post to this thread and as noted in the 'Release Notes' document that comes with each version of NX and which is updated for each MR (Maintenance Release).

Anyway, I hope this helps you sort out the issues that will present themselves if you plan on moving to Office 2013 in the near future.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[hudson888]

Thanks John,

I wasn't expecting the cloud version to run at this stage, just the downloadable version that providing you purchase correct package you'll have access to if you need it. Iv'e reason to want to do a bit of both just to get better bang for my buck out of my Microsoft purchases. I contacted Microsoft and it was they who informed me that with the business subscription you can download the PC based version of Office 2013.

And there's a free trial. And like most things I'd like to have time to do I just don't as much time to do them anymore, which is why I had to stop visiting here on a more regular basis.

I mostly just wanted to see how Office 365 looked on an iPad in case that was something that might be worthwhile for me.

I think it is somewhat important that we'd be able to open two spreadsheets in Excel because I have some customers who'll produce a table for me that I can currently cut and paste into drafting saving me a bunch of work. Granted you can usually still get that to work, if you're careful cutting and pasting, but it would be kind of clunky. I think most will agree it could be tedious at times having to manage with one spreadsheet is running at a time.

The way out I found for the moment is to prevail on microsoft to allow you to download Excel 2010, which you can custom install instead of excel 2013 despite running, if you wish to, the rest of the 2013 office suite. It was intimated to me that this can be arranged.

Best Regards

Hudson

www.jamb.com.au

Nil Desperandum illegitimi non carborundum

 

[JohnRBaker]

The developer who worked on this thinks that if you open the NX spreadsheet first that you'll probably have no problems opening an 'external' spreadsheet as a second document. And besides, Microsoft has been told that they need to provide tools which will allow 3rd party vendors like Siemens PLM to integrate access to Excel without having to contend with the shared document scheme. In order words, give the vendors the option to use Excel 2013 like they do now with Excel 2010.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[hudson888]

Fingers crossed that "telling" Microsoft means something these days then

Best Regards

Hudson

www.jamb.com.au

Nil Desperandum illegitimi non carborundum

 

[Tingsryd]

If your site authors NX manufacturing shop documentation I believe you will need a minimum of 2007.

From the Siemens PLM Community, Manufacturing Forum:
"As we provided our templates in .xlsx, Shop Docs only supports Excel 2007 and later."

NX85

 

[SiW979]

Nice to see you back Hudson

Best regards

Simon NX 7.5.4.4 MP8 and NX 8.5 (native) - TC 8

http://www.jcb.com