What version of Excel are you really using?
Knowing the precise version of Excel can save hours or days of frustration.
I remember when my circle of friends were all turning 18, getting their driver’s licence and buying a car. In suburban Melbourne, no car meant no social life.
After one of my close friends got her licence and brought a second-hand car, I asked her, “what kind of car is it?”.
She replied, “umm, yellow”
She wasn’t wrong. I later discovered it was an early ‘80s, Datsun Stanza. Canary yellow.
Like my friend, I suspect most people use Excel without knowing (or caring) exactly what version of Excel they’re using.
And for most people it doesn’t really matter. Really.
But if you develop solutions for Excel, support Excel or your business lives-and-dies by Excel, knowing the version – the exact version – can make all the difference between hours or days of frustration and solving that obscure Excel problem that’s been plaguing you or your business.
Here’s an example.
I worked for a large asset manager than was migrating from Excel 2016 to Office 365. Some of the spreadsheets they depended on – many of which were over 20 years old – regularly crashed in Excel 365.
It was stable one day and then a pile of rubble the next.
The trigger? The version of Excel changed overnight and a weakness in the spreadsheet – say, far too many complex conditional formatting rules (like over 900 of ‘em) – crashed the spreadsheet.
How did I know the version of Excel changed. Audit Logs and Error Logs. In these we recorded details about the environment including the exact build number which could then be used to research what changes had been implemented in that release, one of which cause the crash.
So how do you get the Excel version number?Here’s some options:
The Formula Method
Excel’s INFO function can return several values including the operating system version such as “Windows (64-bit) NT 10.00”.
While the “RELEASE” parameter does return the current Excel version, it’s only the release number and not the entire version or build number.
The VBA Version Method
VBA has two properties of the Excel Application object which dive a little deeper.
The “Version” property returns the same value as the INFO function.
The “Build” property returns the Excel release build.
Combine them together and you have more granularity, but still not the complete build number.
For example, this combination tells me I have version “16.0.17830”.
Let’s see if we can do any better.
The File Properties Method
If you slip out of Excel and into Windows Explorer, you’ll get the level of detail we want.
Once you find the Excel executable, right-click it and select “Properties” from the short-cut menu.
In the Properties window that displays, select the “Details” tab.
Here you can see the complete build number under the label “Product version”. That’s what we want but from within Excel itself.
The Complete Version Number
Here’s the VBA code to do it (check out the carousel).
We’re using the Scripting “FileSystemObject” which has a method called GetFileVersion.
But before calling that, we need to know where the Excel executable is.
To discover this, we use the Windows Scripting Shell to lookup the Excel executable location from the Windows Registry.
Combine them together for a single VBA function which tells you the exact build number of the installed Excel.
This tells me I’m running version “16.0.17830.20138”.
How Should you use this information
Add this code to your audit logs and error logs (you do have those, don’t you) in your Excel solutions. Also collect a few other environment details like the operation system version, host name, available memory and so on.
You’ll now have sufficient ammunition to investigate even the most cryptic Excel issues.
Happy Exceling