What are the future development plans for the calculator?
The primary development platforms will now be Excel 2007 and Excel 2010 [32-bit version only]. All development work, upgrades and additional features will be limited to these platforms. This means that the Excel 2003 version won’t be upgraded.
Why are you ceasing development work on the Excel 2003 version?
The calculator is essentially a voluntary offering/ public good/ unpaid hobby / attempt by me to build a better mousetrap! I have tried hard to ensure that the exact same functionality was available in both calculators but –as the functionality started to grow- I was starting to experience an increasing level of non-compatibility/ code breakages in the Excel 2003 version. This required a level of conditional branching in the VBA code to ensure that it would execute correctly. In order to keep the maintenance activity at an acceptable level, I have decided to cease all further development of the Excel 2003 version.
So you’re saying that if I use Excel 2003 that I won’t be able to use that calculator for future budgets?
Wrong! You will still be able to use the Excel 2003 calculator - it will continue to be available and you'll still be able to download the Excel 2003 calculator to calculate your net pay in future years. I’ll continue to add budget data for each year (e.g. tax rates, tax credits etc) to that version of the calculator.
However, this decision DOES mean that no new future features or improvements will be included in the Excel 2003 file. The Excel 2007 [and later] calculator will be the slickest and most feature rich versions.
I strongly disagree with this silly decision!
OK- if I hear from enough users asking me to reverse this decision I might be convinced to reconsider- why don't you send an e-mail to let me know!