More vista, excel problems
 

I have software that I am trying to run on my laptop. I have Vista home edition on the laptop which apparantly does not have Excel. The software (retscreen), needs Excel to run. I tried Excel viewer and Open office and they didn't work. Retscreen says in the FAQ that it won't work with Open office. Any ideas? If I had to I would buy a copy of Excel, but I have heard of people running this software using Vista. It does mention that I have to allow macros, but I don't know how to do that.

Thanks for any help

What "software" are you using that needs to have Excel? Is it a program or just a spreadsheet/workbook?

http://www.retscreen.net/

Software & Data Requirements: Microsoft® Excel 2000 or higher; Microsoft® Windows 2000 or higher; and Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or higher. Please make sure that the latest updates from Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) for Windows and Excel are installed on your computer.

I believe it is basically an Excel spreadsheet. It is used to estimate output of solar panels.

28.1MB . . . that's a pretty big workbook

Its probably a large spreadsheet with a bunch of VBA code. (a guess)
If so, alternative spreadsheets like OpenOffice can open the file, but it won't work because it doesn't know how to handle VBA. Or it is possible the file itself is looking for real Excel and won't launch if it doesn't find it.

I'm using Office 2k3 on Vista with no problems. And I do a lot of Excel sheets too.