Can Office 2003 and 2007 co-exist?

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Gregory
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J

John Gregory

Our IT department, in their infinite wisdom has decided to upgrade to Office
2007 – excluding Outlook 2007. We had a full version of Office 2003 that
worked well as a complete suite.

However, Outlook 2003 does not seem to play nice with Word 2007 (Microsoft
error perhaps?). So the end result is that we use both Word 2003 and 2007.
This seems to be creating some issues in that settings keep changing, window
and task pane sizes vary, programs do not seem to know which version to
start, etc. This is true for all of the Office programs.

The whole installation now seems to be FUBAR.

Is there a way I can disable Office 2007 without uninstalling it? At least
until our IT department decides to install Outlook 2007.
 
I use 2003 and 2007 side by side - with Outlook 2007 - without any issues. I
know of no reason why it should not work with Outlook 2003, but there are
some issues to be aware of - and each application is different.

Firstly you must install the older version first, that is 2003 before 2007,
so if you have tried to re-install 2003 after having upgraded to 2007 you
may hit all sorts of issues, and you will have to uninstall both versions,
reinstall 2003 and then reinstall 2007 (choosing the option to not uninstall
the previous versions you want to keep).

When you have multiple versions installed, by default, Word will check which
version is the default and, if you're trying to start a different version,
it will run its configuration process to make the version you're trying to
use, its default. There are some advantages to this, but mostly it's just an
irritant, and it can be prevented: see
http://word2007bible.herbtyson.com/2007/04/15/word-2007-and-word-2003-coexisting/

If you use Word as your e-mail editor in Outlook 2003, it must be Word 2003.
I don't know how Outlook handles this behind the scenes but my guess is
that it checks to see what the default version of Word is, and if it is not
compatible with the Outlook version, it will refuse to use it. If this is
the case, you will need to make sure that Word 2003 is the default version.
To do this you will need to open Word 2003 before you follow the procedure
in the above link.

Now, if you wish to use Word 2007 after having made - and fixed - Word 2003
as your default you will need to open it explicitly, rather than just
double-clicking on document icons.

Other applications, by and large co-exist without issues I know about, but
Access will always run its configuration if you chop and change between
versions. As you are non-specific in your post, it is hard to speculate
further.

In summary, if you can't get your IT department to install Outlook 2007,
just make sure you have the versions installed in the right order and they
_should_ work as expected. If y ou have specific issues, perhaps you could
state explicitly what they are.
 
That seems to work, Thank you for the help.

By the way, do you know if there is a Excel version of this fix?
 
Excel doesn't have the problem in the first place. If you're seeing
something unexpected, it has another cause.
 
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