# Office 2007 concurrent with Office 2003



## Tabvla (Apr 10, 2006)

I want to install Office 2007 on a machine that currently has Office 2003 installed.

I would like to have both versions installed concurrently on the same machine so that I can access either version independently.

Q1. Have any of the Forum members successfully had both versions installed concurrently on the same machine?

Q2. If "yes" to Q1, what precautions need to be followed at the time of installation?



TiA


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## etaf (Oct 2, 2003)

i have 2007 - it asked me during the install if i wanted to keep the old version of office - i said yes 
its installed .....

not tried to remove to see what happens


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## Tabvla (Apr 10, 2006)

Thanks for the info etaf - most helpful.

A couple more questions, if you have a moment...

Q1. After installation of 2007 have you been able to access all the Office programs in either version?

Q2. Are you able to use the 2 versions simultaneously? For example, can you have Word 2003 and Word 2007 documents open at the same time?

Q3. Has installing 2007 had any noticeable impact on any of the 2003 programs?

Q4. Which versions of 2003 and 2007 do you have concurrently installed?


TiA


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## etaf (Oct 2, 2003)

Q1. After installation of 2007 have you been able to access all the Office programs in either version? - 

only installed this morning so dont know - outlook 2003 is OK used all day

Q2. Are you able to use the 2 versions simultaneously? For example, can you have Word 2003 and Word 2007 documents open at the same time? - 

Yes

Q3. Has installing 2007 had any noticeable impact on any of the 2003 programs?

- to early to say 

Q4. Which versions of 2003 and 2007 do you have concurrently installed?

not sure - cant find the help about   - however, I will be de-installing today for other reasons - nothing to do with compatability - I just dont want it on this machine having thought about usage


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## Tabvla (Apr 10, 2006)

Hi Etaf, thanks for your prompt reply.

I would be grateful for any further information that you may have on this subject in the future.


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## Zack Barresse (Jul 25, 2004)

I have both versions installed as well. AFAIK you can only have one version of Outlook installed, so I have no Outlook 2003. I cannot get all applications to run both versions concurrently. Excel I can, but that is all. I believe this is because it is a single instance application, whereas the others are not. But I can use any of the applications/versions that I want.

The only problem (more of a nuisance) is when I switch between versions of Word, I get a short little dialog box that says installing components. After a few seconds it opens just fine. I'm not sure what it is doing or why it is there. I'm assuming that the versions share some common files and it must be in the configuration somewhere, but I'm not sure.

Some other issues with both versions (besides the above Word issue) is with your Personal.xls file, Excel 2007 will create one if you do not already have one. The new file format will be an XLSB instead of the previous XLS. This means it will not work in 2003 version. I saved my Personal.xlsb file as Personal.xls, although it doesn't work for me in 2003. I'm thinking it's an encoding issue, but not sure on that either.

The versions I have are Office 2003 Professional and Office 2007 Professional.

HTH


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## Tabvla (Apr 10, 2006)

Hi Firefytr,

Thanks for the feedback, most informative.

As I expected (feared, dreaded....!) there do appear to be some issues around running the two versions concurrently. It would be nice if MS had provided an installation option that allowed both versions to be installed on the same machine.

I am keen to install 2007 but am extremely reluctant (at this stage) to let go of 2003 as I am very dependent upon Office for my daily work. I would like to be able to learn 2007 in a real-time environment over a few months while continuing to be productive using 2003. In this way I could gradually make the transition, one application at a time. It would have been nice if MS had thought that users may want to do this...!

I will still pursue ideas to try and achieve concurrent installations but if 2003 and 2007 share common Registry keys then it would be a mission impossible


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## Zack Barresse (Jul 25, 2004)

Partition your hard drive, install each version on it's own HD. That's what I did. I was in the same boat as you, very leary about it. I actually haven't had any problems with 2007 that I feared. I think you'd be fine. If you haven't used Office 2007 though, you might be in for a shock with the new menus (the Ribbon). I like it better [than the old] now that I've used it for a few months.

Good luck!


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## stariq (Apr 25, 2007)

hi,
I have Office 2003 on a XP Machine. I have installed Office 2007 on the same machine on the same partition - all works well so far.

Is there a way of having Office 2003 as the default when a user opens up an office document instead of Office 2007?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advanced

stariq


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## etaf (Oct 2, 2003)

I think if you rightclick on the file then open with - choose - now from the list choose the 2003 version and tick always use - that may do it - I think I did this in the past with access 97 and 2k - as there was some compatability issues - between versions


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## stariq (Apr 25, 2007)

thanks for the promt reply:

two things:
I tried to select from list option, browse for Office11 and click on Word and it still opens up 2007 :/

And the option to always choose this program is greyed out :/

Thanks

Stariq


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## Tabvla (Apr 10, 2006)

Hi All..... thanks for the replies and suggestions.

I still have some concerns about running concurrent instances of Office 2003 and Office 2007.

My major concern is the Registry. If 2003 / 2007 have completely separate Registry entries, then installing 2007 in a separate Folder (or even a separate partition) should result in two completely separate instances of Office which (in theory) should work as if they were two completely different programs.

However, if there are shared Registry entries between the versions or if 2007 overwrites existing Registry entries used by 2003 then there is no way that these two versions will operate as two completely separate programs.

To summarise therefore, my question is: "Does Office 2003 and 2007 use completely separate Registry entries OR are some entries shared between the versions OR does 2007 overwrite some 2003 entries?"

T.


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## djangojazz (Apr 11, 2006)

Tabvla said:


> Hi All..... thanks for the replies and suggestions.
> 
> I still have some concerns about running concurrent instances of Office 2003 and Office 2007.
> 
> ...


You know if you have a legitimate version of Office 2003 and really really have to use it you may install a "virtual PC" and use it on there. Microsoft Virtual PC can run on most versions of Vista and XP Pro. I use it to try to do multiple runnings of things at times. Simply uninstall 2003 and install Virtual PC just like a regular computer and put 2003 in it.

I beta tested 2007 and have used some of the new office products of 2007 as well. It's meant to not work with Office other versions because it already has legacy apps built into it. You may save as older word, publisher, powerpoint, etc apps. My experience when I tried to run both was that crashes would sometimes occur and sometimes the system would go slow because of it.

Newer computers can handle 2007 very well but older hardware seems to have problems. If running two copies of things from the same manufacturer I would recommend using a guinea pig folder or other OS to see what it does. But.... I wouldn't run newer things in a virtual environment because the virtual environment will always be a little bit slower. If you don't like MS Virtual PC I have heard from others VM Ware? makes one too and some claim it is better.


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## tnelson42345 (Dec 13, 2005)

I have both 2003 and 2007 running at the same time, but I would like to take this a step farther if possible. Is it possible to allow only certain users access to Office 2003? We need to upgrade all of our labs to 2007 b/c of the textbooks. BTW, I work for a college. But a few users will still need 2003 in one lab from time to time. These users are temp accounts and not normal students or faculty.

thanks for any help.


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## djangojazz (Apr 11, 2006)

tnelson42345 said:


> I have both 2003 and 2007 running at the same time, but I would like to take this a step farther if possible. Is it possible to allow only certain users access to Office 2003? We need to upgrade all of our labs to 2007 b/c of the textbooks. BTW, I work for a college. But a few users will still need 2003 in one lab from time to time. These users are temp accounts and not normal students or faculty.
> 
> thanks for any help.


Yes there are many ways to achieve what you are saying. The most efficient way I would say would be from the server if possible. Group policy has so many settings now a days you may change many things there. I myself am not yet an MCSE and don't know everything I can do so I'll give you a scenario of what I do with an app but you may do the same with Office 2003 as well. I go in locally as the admin, of that computer (I only have 12 clients so I do it this way), I remove all the links they have for the program I don't want them to use. Personally I did this with IE because I was getting infected machines so I installed a bunch of protection and then installed firefox with wiping clean the records everytime. Since so many people liked IE, I just made it harder to find, I removed it from the quicklaunch, as the default browser, etc. Then I put Firefox listed as "Internet" on all my systems and the people didn't really have a choice. They could have found it if they wanted, but I made it not as accessible and all but one just got used to the new way after a little bit of complaining of why did they need to change.

Now if that doesn't work you may also locate the parent folder of Office 2003, it's Office 11 I think. Right Click, hit sharing and security and remove the everyone and parent and replace it with who you want and make sure the people that can't use it are given warning, know they shouldn't use the old one, and don't freak out when they get an error message from Office 2003. I would test that method first in that it works right by logging in myself as different users.


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## mwballenger (Jul 28, 2008)

We began running 2003 and 2007 concurrently about 2 weeks ago and my advice could be summed up in one word- dont. Both Office 2003 and 2007 load into separate directories, so there doesn't appear to be an issue of files being overwritten, but we are still troubleshooting the whats to figure out the whys. Here are some of the issues we've run into so far-

Some of our computers will attempt to re-install Office 2007 applications after the similar 2003 application has been used and vice versa. IE. If you open Microsoft Word 2007 after using Word 2003 (same user) Office 2007 will attempt to re-install. We have the same image on 25 identical Dell computers and we have not yet identified what causes this to happen on some but not others.

Office 2007 templates and some other functions revert to their Office 2003 formats after 2003 has been used. I.E. Word 2007 templates are presented in the old tabbed 2003 format displaying icons or names versus the 2007 format of menus and document previews.

Access Wizards in 2007 do not work if the Access 2003 application has been run on the computer.

Word 2007 spelling and grammar checks do not work once the Word 2003 application has been started. To make them work again, you must go into the menu, clear all spelling an grammar check boxes, then check them again.

We have 4 more weeks until we re-image to all Office 2007. We're working through the issues until then.


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## Tabvla (Apr 10, 2006)

Hi mwballenger, welcome to the Forum 

Thank you for a very informative reply.

You would think, considering the price of the product and the vast experience that Microsoft has, that they could make a better effort.

Why is it that software testing always seems to draw the short straw....??

T.


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## djangojazz (Apr 11, 2006)

mwballenger said:


> We began running 2003 and 2007 concurrently about 2 weeks ago and my advice could be summed up in one word- dont. Both Office 2003 and 2007 load into separate directories, so there doesn't appear to be an issue of files being overwritten, but we are still troubleshooting the whats to figure out the whys. Here are some of the issues we've run into so far-
> 
> Some of our computers will attempt to re-install Office 2007 applications after the similar 2003 application has been used and vice versa. IE. If you open Microsoft Word 2007 after using Word 2003 (same user) Office 2007 will attempt to re-install. We have the same image on 25 identical Dell computers and we have not yet identified what causes this to happen on some but not others.
> 
> ...


Yes I would guess that either the registry or the user's profiles are getting a little weirded out by that instance. A lot of times people that develop software do go out of their way to make software to use multiple instances of something. Me I mentioned virtualization because the beauty of virtualization is if something doesn't work, you hit the magic undo disks button and it's like it never happened. Also you may also get around the issue with one more thing, possibly. I have never tried it but I believe Terminal Server which is a part of Server 2003 can manage versions of Office so you could log in to access a different version with a different user. I'm guessing that the problems are are rising from your user profiles as well not liking different versions of Office running at: C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Microsoft\Office.

Generally I use Mozilla products because they are so hands on, get down and into the stuff and customize it and MS is so much like only this way and not any other way. A lot of times with MS too you don't know what went wrong or why unless you have a fairly decent knowledge of what is even not working. PC Load Letter what the h#ll does that mean? = Mapi32.dll error in Outlook. Love that one. Most of the problems I encountered with Office in the last year were with Outlook not liking versions 2002 to 2003, 2003 to 2007; Business Contact Manager (Godawful add on that loves for it's service to stop at times); and if you use it MODI or(Microsoft Document Imager) the amazing crash when you click the "File" menu.


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