APRM's Excel add-in vs. the version of Microsoft Excel.

Problem Summary

Microsoft's Excel version 2007 is not compatible with APRM's Excel add-in.

Background

Excel versions prior to 2007 allowed the APRM Excel add-in to load the historic data generated by the CVTAPRMHST command and then, as a separate option, to draw charts of performance and resource levels by partition.  Excel version 2007 fails to draw those charts using the APRM add-in.

Issues

The Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code in APRM's Excel add-in uses Excel's (former) internal names for chart types, attributes, selections etc.  Microsoft changed some of these internal names at Excel version 2007 and, thereby, has invalidated several that were used in the APRM add-in.  This prevents successful generation of these graphs which use 2 vertical axes and charts 2 sets of data.  Each set of data is scaled according to its own axis values.

Solutions

There are two possible ways to circumvent this problem:

• Use an older version of Excel such as Excel 2003.  This can be installed on a newer version of Windows and used alternatively with the still-installed newer version.  Place the APRM Excel add-in into the XLSTART directory for this older Excel product.  Most companies have a license for this version of Excel in addition to any newer version(s).


• Use Excel 2007 or later and use the APRM add-in to read your extracted APRM data and provide column headings for it.  Then, draw the charts using Excel's menu-driven methods.  An Excel macro may be used to customize these charts to your installation and to eliminate repetitive effort.

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