What's new in OAK 4

This page in 2007
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Compared with earlier versions, OAK

•	has been rewritten in C#, which makes it very much faster than earlier versions which were written in VBA

•	is multithreaded, which means that it is more responsive to user interruption of commands

•	when loaded into Excel 2007 or 2010, implements the new Office ribbon interface (but still offers the old menus in earlier versions of Excel)

•	is capable of handling the much larger spreadsheets that are possible in Excel 2007 and 2010

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implements new technologies which actually interpret Excel formulas, on which are built useful new functions that can reconstruct, prune, simplify, dename, and analyse discrepancies between formulas, all of which are useful in checking spreadsheets, particularly through the development of parallel reconstructions of calculations

•	exposes its entire interface to COM, meaning that it can be scripted using a programming language such as VBA.

More detailed improvements include

•	an installation utility capable of reacting well to a much wider range of environments, including in particular Windows 7 and Vista.

•	automated checking for and installation of updates

•	the ability to reverse changes to a spreadsheet made by the comparison function

•	addition of two new commands, Copy literal and Transpose

•	greatly extended help, both on the workstation on which OAK is installed and online at www.operisanalysiskit.com.

Some of these changes were made progressively in successive versions of OAK 3. They are brought together in their entirety in OAK 4.

A log of changes from release to release of version 4 can be found in the reference material.