That’s not usually the case. That’s what IT department thinks is the reason, but finance can and does deal with broken files all the time for a variety of reasons.
I think what you’re referencing is when the IT department asks me and my team, do any processes break if we change version’s? And the answer is always, please we’ve been asking for years. Occasionally there is an add on we use that becomes a dependency. I feel like that was more of an issue in the past. Now that basically everything is 64 bit compatible, we do some testing and tell IT no risk here.
Excel has good support for rolling forward. Not always backwards compatible, but going forward breaking is quite rare. Things like XLS to XLSX happen rarely and they still largely work moving forward.
When I talk to the IT guys it’s more about reliance on exchange servers, outlook/calendar, and of course the corporate licensing that makes upgrading just for us finance guys difficult
I think what you’re referencing is when the IT department asks me and my team, do any processes break if we change version’s? And the answer is always, please we’ve been asking for years. Occasionally there is an add on we use that becomes a dependency. I feel like that was more of an issue in the past. Now that basically everything is 64 bit compatible, we do some testing and tell IT no risk here.
Excel has good support for rolling forward. Not always backwards compatible, but going forward breaking is quite rare. Things like XLS to XLSX happen rarely and they still largely work moving forward.
When I talk to the IT guys it’s more about reliance on exchange servers, outlook/calendar, and of course the corporate licensing that makes upgrading just for us finance guys difficult