running 2 versions of microsoft office

[paul cottingham]

I have a colleague who make a good side living up converting old office docs to be compatible with new versions. We used to have to do a lot of work when upgrading office suites, so made good money there. eventually, we used the virtualbox solution which is admittedly complex, or moved over to a less nasty option, like OpenOffice. admittedly, new versions of office may not have these problems anymore. I just think its ridiculous to pay for the privilege, if the problem emerges.

[Rich Engelhardt]

I want to run 2 versions of MS office, 2003 and 2007 because a self-help book i have, MS access 2003, does not help in access 2007 which i currently have installed. Has anyone tried this before and, if yes, how well did it work.

Yes. I've had to run different versions of Office on the same PC. One of my past customers had several databases written w/Access 97. I had to make them work by installing Office 97. They ran Office 97 along with Office 2003 and Office 2010.
It was a constant battle trying to make everything work together - however - it wasn't impossible.
Just pay close attention to any errors that pop up and google the error message exactly as it's displayed.
Fortunately, in my case, all the errors were generated from the older Office 97 program & there's a ton of help out there.

One tip I can give. Keep all the stuff you create separated by version in separate folders.
You can then create a shortcut to one of them by right clicking one of the documents/databases. On the right click menu, you'll have an option of which version of Office to use to open it. If you store all the Offfice 2003 stuff in a folder called "Office 2003 docs", and create one shortcut to say an Word 2003 document, that one shortcut will carry over to all the documents in that folder. Then you can just double click on a document and Windows will default to using Word 2003 to open all the Word documents in that folder when you click on one.

[Lornie McCullough]

Use open office. To improve your sharpening skills. On oil stones. Tails first, of course.
Seriously. Use open office.

+1

OpenOffice is free and open-source software, and comes with free upgrades. OpenOffice (and linux) is the future..... Microsoft Office (and microsoft operating systems) are the past. I got off the microsoft upgrade ($$$$$) treadmill more than eight years ago, and have been exquisitely happy ever since. You can download for free, versions of OpenOffice for linux AND for microsoft operating systems.

Your mileage may vary (of course!!).

Lornie

[Brian Elfert]

+1

OpenOffice is free and open-source software, and comes with free upgrades. OpenOffice (and linux) is the future..... Microsoft Office (and microsoft operating systems) are the past. I got off the microsoft upgrade ($$$$$) treadmill more than eight years ago, and have been exquisitely happy ever since. You can download for free, versions of OpenOffice for linux AND for microsoft operating systems.

For the home user, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are probably fine. The alternatives can be not so great for office users. I'm not really sure why I paid $50 for a Office 2010 license for home and didn't consider one of the free alternatives.

My employer looked at going to Google Apps to replace Microsoft Office and Exchange back in 2009. We ultimately decided that the savings wasn't enough to offset productivity loss and other issues. A lot of the spreadsheets used by our finance dept did not open properly so they would have needed to keep Microsoft Office. Google Apps also works best when you your files on their servers. They had a limit at the time on the number of files stored no matter how much disk space used.

[Curt Harms]

For the home user, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are probably fine. The alternatives can be not so great for office users. I'm not really sure why I paid $50 for a Office 2010 license for home and didn't consider one of the free alternatives.

My employer looked at going to Google Apps to replace Microsoft Office and Exchange back in 2009. We ultimately decided that the savings wasn't enough to offset productivity loss and other issues. A lot of the spreadsheets used by our finance dept did not open properly so they would have needed to keep Microsoft Office. Google Apps also works best when you your files on their servers. They had a limit at the time on the number of files stored no matter how much disk space used.

There's another alternative office suite available for Windows, Mac & Linux that has gotten high marks for their ability to work with MSO files. I don't have any complex spreadsheets with VBA but it'd be interesting to see if they'd run. 30 day trial and if you accept their emails they have frequent sales. It appears that because I have downloaded the trial in the past, I'd qualify for upgrade pricing if I chose to buy a license.

http://softmaker.com/english/ofltm_en.htm

I don't think there's any desire on the part of LibreOffice/OpenOffice to support VBA so I don't see how MS macros will work. Libreoffice works for me, I don't have the need to be 100% MSO compatible and LibreOffice 4 imports .docx quite faithfully. I don't know about exporting.

[Matt Meiser]

What most Office-haters in this thread don't realize is that a significant part of the business world RUNS on very complicated macro-laden Microsoft Excel workbooks and Access databases that have been created in every nook and cranny of the business and provide absolutely critical functionality. IT folks wake having panic attacks in the middle of the night thinking about it but its been that way for at least the 15 years I've worked with some of the worlds largest manufacturing companies because it allows filling all the holes in their major business systems without significant customization of those systems. You also aren't seeing major new functionality that's being added to Office in the areas of Sharepoint integration and Business Intelligence. There are some extremely powerful collaboration and data mining tools built into even Office 2010 more so in 2013. Obviously those features provide little value to home users and I'd bet that's part of the reasoning behind MS offering home users a significant discount for a home license. MS also offers volume customers the ability to let their employees use a copy of Office at home at little or no cost to the employee (at my old place we had to pay $10 to order the media.)

[Grant Wilkinson]

To the OP: You can run multiple versions of Office on the same PC. You can even have docs open in two versions of Word, Excel, etc, if you like, so you can cut and paste between them.

[Brian Elfert]

Matt is absolutely right about business using Excel and Access. My employer still has an old application that uses a spreadsheet created in Excel 2000 or 2003 . The spreadsheet is loaded with data and then run through an application that posts the data to a web page. It won't work with newer versions of Excel and the person who wrote the application is long gone. We used to have 100+ Access databases critical to company operation, but that number has been cut drastically in recent years.

[Matt Meiser]

We used to have 100+ Access databases critical to company operation, but that number has been cut drastically in recent years.

That you know of

[paul cottingham]

Matt is absolutely right about business using Excel and Access. My employer still has an old application that uses a spreadsheet created in Excel 2000 or 2003 . The spreadsheet is loaded with data and then run through an application that posts the data to a web page. It won't work with newer versions of Excel and the person who wrote the application is long gone. We used to have 100+ Access databases critical to company operation, but that number has been cut drastically in recent years.

And that is where the problem lies. Lack of backwards compatibility. I admit to an ideological bias against excel etc, and this thread show why, running old MS docs gets ugly. Paying for the privilege of such headaches makes no sense to me.
BTW when I still owned my IT company, we had no problem moving companies away from ms office, and into OpenOffice.
Again, to answer the OPs question, the simplest, and least ugly solution is running the older version in a virtual machine.

[Brian Ashton]

I haven't experienced any upward compatibility issues with Office products, mainly using Excel and Word and PowerPoint. Going the other way is an obvious issue and shouldn't be a reason to knock Microsoft.

See it many times over the revisions. Excel is the most insidious in that the errors aren't often obvious. I've had entire sheets that needed to be scrapped because at times even the most basic logic formula like if or sum commands stops functioning. I've tried rewriting them from scratch in the original spreadsheet using the newer version to no avail. Even tried cutting and pasting the cells to a new spreadsheet with no success. I had a huge spreadsheet with about 30 sum commands that wouldn't work at all. What makes it insidious though is that often, unlike the last example were nothing worked, there'll be one innocuous command out of 10 or hundreds that ceases to function and you don't find out till long after you've been relying on the answers generated. What makes it a real pain is there appears to be no rhyme or reason behind what stops working and what doesn't. I wonder how many companies are relying on such corrupted data without any idea...


Words errors are much more obvious - usually formatting that gets stuffed and needs to be redone. I often see docs from older versions where they've been edited in newer versions and the new formatting doesn't line up with existing formatting. But thats more a programming change as opposed to a bug in the software.

But by comparison I'll take those errors over trying, ad noisome, to swim against the global MS Office current and go with some free version that is fraught with far more risks that makes it's free status worthless. I use mac all the time but run anything to do with the business world in Win XP or Win 8 running on a virtual drive. Even Mac Office wouldn't be worth the price if it were free.

[Mike Heidrick]

use open office.

yep yep yep

[Curt Harms]

See it many times over the revisions. Excel is the most insidious in that the errors aren't often obvious. I've had entire sheets that needed to be scrapped because at times even the most basic logic formula like if or sum commands stops functioning. I've tried rewriting them from scratch in the original spreadsheet using the newer version to no avail. Even tried cutting and pasting the cells to a new spreadsheet with no success. I had a huge spreadsheet with about 30 sum commands that wouldn't work at all. What makes it insidious though is that often, unlike the last example were nothing worked, there'll be one innocuous command out of 10 or hundreds that ceases to function and you don't find out till long after you've been relying on the answers generated. What makes it a real pain is there appears to be no rhyme or reason behind what stops working and what doesn't. I wonder how many companies are relying on such corrupted data without any idea...


Words errors are much more obvious - usually formatting that gets stuffed and needs to be redone. I often see docs from older versions where they've been edited in newer versions and the new formatting doesn't line up with existing formatting. But thats more a programming change as opposed to a bug in the software.

But by comparison I'll take those errors over trying, ad noisome, to swim against the global MS Office current and go with some free version that is fraught with far more risks that makes it's free status worthless. I use mac all the time but run anything to do with the business world in Win XP or Win 8 running on a virtual drive. Even Mac Office wouldn't be worth the price if it were free.

I've thought that the ultimate malware didn't do anything - - except randomly and infrequently change numbers in Excel spreadsheets. Sounds like somebody already did it.