WMDC With Office 2010 64 bit? Maybe, Maybe Not

[Ed Hansberry]

<p>By now most of you know that Office 2010 is in an open beta for <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/default.aspx" target="_blank">anyone to download</a>. I was perusing the <a href="http://officebeta.microsoft.com/en-us/wordhelp/microsoft-office-2010-beta-2-known-issuesreadme-HA101267290.aspx#_Toc244933301" target="_blank">release notes</a> when I ran across something in the Outlook 2010 section that bothered me a bit.</p><ul><li>Programmability / Add-ins:Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) no longer operates when 64-bit Outlook 2010 is installed on 64-bit Windows.</li><li>Upgrading 32-bit Outlook 2007 to 64-bit Outlook 2010 could also result in data loss during first sync with WMDC.</li><li>The WMDC will not be upgraded to work on 64-bit Windows when 64-bit Outlook 2010 is installed.</li></ul><p>All of the fixes and workarounds revolve around retaining a 32 bit version of Office 2010 rather than a 64 bit version. I cannot tell if this is a temporary issue during the beta phase or&nbsp;a permanent one. If the latter, it means WMDC is nearing the end of its life. I think Windows 7 is the last 32bit OS Microsoft will release for desktops and it is likely that the next version of Office may be 64 bit only as well.</p><p>Before anyone jumps up and asks why anyone is using WMDC anyway, just remember, not everyone has a cloud solution to sync with and even if they do, some apps like eWallet or PocketBible still require WMDC to do record level syncing with its desktop counterpart. I am sure those apps and others are headed towards online syncing, but in the meantime, if you still need WMDC, keep the above warnings in mind when deciding between a 32 bit and 64 bit version of Office.</p>

[m@rk]

To be fair, I think it is only OneNote that is tying me to WMDC on 7 and ActiveSync on XP and we already know that OneNote 2010 is supposed to be cloud enabled before much longer so that need will go away too.

Add in Mesh for Mobile and My Phone and it is hard to see a need to directly connect my phone to my PC any more with one big exception.

MUSIC

Does anybody want to sync 4GB of Music files over GPRS :-)

[Ed Hansberry]

Add in Mesh for Mobile
I have tried Mesh about 4 times on new phones, old phones freshly hard reset phones, etc. After 2-3 syncs, it always starts reporting errors when it starts up. I've given up on it. I still use Mesh on 4 PCs I use and would really like to use it on my phone, but it simply isn't stable enough for the latter, thus, I use WMDC for files still.

[paschott]

Completely missed that section in the Readme. I have no idea what MS is thinking with the 64-bit version of Office at times. From everything I can tell so far there are no major advantages to the 64-bit version and a LOT of disadvantages. At this point it looks like I'm moving back towards the 32-bit version just to get things working correctly.

[gdoerr56]

There are advantages to Office x64 especially with Excel. The 64 bit version removes the row limits of the 32 bit version and allows for obscenely large spreadsheets. Granted, there aren't many users that will push Excel that hard but for those that do, it will be a godsend.

I really don't care about WMDC anyway....

[Ed Hansberry]

There are advantages to Office x64 especially with Excel. The 64 bit version removes the row limits of the 32 bit version and allows for obscenely large spreadsheets.
Do you have a link for that? The only place I can find meaningful info on row limits in Excel being in the 100 million row range is here http://mkeeper.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!60F12A60288E5607!485.entry?wa=wsignin1.0&sa=187050833 and that is part of a new feature called SQL PowerPivot for Excel 2010. Those may not be true spreadsheet rows but a new special table/pivottable feature that allows working with that many rows of imported data.

As for me, I've never gone above 250K rows in Excel 2007 and that was just a database import from Access that I then wrote some pretty Excel reports on top of using SumIfs(). Looked nice, but man it was dog slow to calculate - over 30 minutes on a dual core 2.16GHz mobile processor. That was some 20-25K formulas. I cannot imagine going to 1M or beyond. I'd need to get an 8 core machine to deal with that.