.pst trouble - transfer/translate options or ideas?

[Guest]

Long story short, I accidentally deleted my Office 2003 off my former primary
laptop by way of deleting "Office 97" which also showed up in the installed
programs list and was begging to let go of 300+ MB of storage by being
deleted.

Add to that the fact that I moved and can't find my Office 2003 CD (looking
for the receipt from last fall) and I have a big fat .pst file with multiple
years of email and contacts that is pretty much worthless to me. I'd really
like to keep it - heck, even have access to it.

My new laptop has Office '07 Teacher/Student on it which no longer includes
Outlook. I don't want to repurchase office while I look for my receipt and
figured it would be easy enough to move the data in that file into a program
like Thunderbird/Lightning for safe keeping while the software issue is
resolved - but its not even possible unless you have outlook installed on
that machine.

I'm dumbfounded - any ideas short of a full repurchase that would get me
access and safekeeping to this information? Thanks!

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

No other program can access a PST file besides Outlook.

 

[Guest]

Well, I just tried downloading the Office 2007 demo - which includes Outlook
- only to find out that it has the import/export feature locked out. That
was a huge wast of time... Guess I can try to import it into an older
machine I have in hopes of exporting to something else or at least getting it
in a universal format.

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

You never access PST data by importing it. You just open the file. Not sure
a demo would let you do that either.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply, Russ. I've imported .pst files a number of times, so
that simply isn't true. Its an option on File/Import and Export/Import from
a file menu. I've never tried to 'open' a .pst file - its not an executable,
so I'm not sure what would happen. Maybe with Outlook on the machine it just
loads right up?

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

I didn't say you couldn't import a PST file. I said you shouldn't. If you
want to have your data intact and unaltered, you open the PST file. You only
import files that are not native to Outlook. Follow these complicated
instructions:
File > Open > Outlook Data File...

 

[Guest]

I guess I confused 'never' with 'shouldn't'. Thanks for your uncomplicated
advice on solving my problem.