Warning On Office 2007 "Try-Before-You-Buy"

walterbyrd writes with a warning: "Microsoft is pushing Office 2007 with 'try-before-you-buy.' Please don't let your friends and relatives install Microsoft 'trial' software. When Microsoft tells you 'try-before-you-buy,' the 'buy' part is not meant to be an option. Once you 'try' a Microsoft 'upgrade' you can not easily go back, because your files will be replaced by new versions that you need the new software to read." The ChannelRegister article also notes how Microsoft's push goes against the grain of the consumer revolt against "crapware." Read on for an account of walterbyrd's experience with a previous Microsoft trial upgrade.

I remember when my brother-in-law decided to try Office-2003. It was a complete mess. I didn't think I'd ever get it fixed. Here is the story:

Office-2003 installed over his Office-2000. His Outlook-2000 email was reformatted to the new-and-improved Outlook-2003. And Outlook-2003 format is incompatible with everything except Outlook-2003. So when his trial period was over, he could no longer access his email — unless he wanted to buy Office-2003.

Of course, I could not fully remove the "trial" version of Office-2003. Once Office-2003 has been installed, it can not overwritten with an earlier version of Office. Also, you cannot remove Office-2003 and re-install Office-2000, unless you know how to hack the registry. And you can not easily install Office-2000 and Office-2003 on the same PC.

What I eventually did to correct the situation:

- Signed up for my own trial version of Office-2003
- Used my trial version to import my brother-in-law's email file
- Saved my brother-in-law's email in another format
- Backed up his data
- Wiped his HDD
- Restored everything

In fairness, I have not used the trial version of Office-2007. But, after my experience with the trial version of Office-2003, I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. Please make sure your friends don't touch it either.

Compatibility pack for 2007

[hiroller]

I can't speak for the other components of MS Office such as Outlook, Microsoft does provide a compatibility pack [microsoft.com] for word, excel and powerpoint formats which allow someone with an older version of office (XP) view the newer documents.

Re:prompt?

[Duhavid]

"His Outlook-2000 email was reformatted to the new-and-improved Outlook-2003. And Outlook-2003 format is incompatible with everything except Outlook-2003. So when his trial period was over, he could no longer access his email -- unless he wanted to buy Office-2003"

Re:prompt?

[erroneus]

Not that anyone should be surprised, but you didn't even read the summary. This guy's account is that it changed his files without prompting... in the case specifically described, it was the user's Outlook database, not his word docs.

"Spastic"? How about trigger-happy?

Re:prompt?

[Osty]

If you're just talking about the new .*x formats (.docx, .xlsx), you actively have to work at converting your old files to the new format. If you open an old .doc or .xls in Word 2007 or Excel 2007 and then try to save it, the document will continue to use the old format. New documents will save in the new format, and you can convert your old documents to the new format, but it's not done automatically.

That said, the linked article is not even talking about any of that at all. It's simply pointing out that some new PCs are now shipping with trial versions of Office 2007, and says nothing about any difficulties of downgrading to an older version. The submitter's summary and story have absolutely nothing to do with the linked article, and are based on issues with a version of Office 4 years and 2 versions older than what's currently available.

Outlook pst conversion is a different story, but I think the submitter went about it in a strange way. Outlook allows you to export and import your data in many different formats, so I don't understand why he had to install his own copy of the trial just to export some data. More importantly, why would you risk important data without a backup when trialling software that you're not 100% sure you want to keep? That's just bad practice with anything, not just Microsoft products.

FUD.

[Txiasaeia]

Scared of the new Office 2007 formats? Afraid that if you save a document in Word 2007, you won't be able to open it in Word XP, 2000, or 2003? Here you go. [microsoft.com]

This entire "article" is FUD. Say what you will about Microsoft formats, but so long as you're using Word, Excel, or Powerpoint (i.e. not Outlook), there's nothing to worry about. And for the record, I've tried importing the mail from an Outlook 2007 PST file in Outlook 2003, and it works perfectly fine. There's also apparently workarounds for importing 2007 PST files into earlier versions of Outlook - including 2003 into XP, 2000, and so forth - as described here [microsoft.com].

Forced Upgrade

[tiny69]

Forced upgrades to new versions of MS Office is a normal experience in a large company. Typical senerio:

One week after a new version of MS Office is release, someone in the company gets a new computer. Unless the company has a strict policy that controls all incoming computer hardware and makes sures that said hardware is reinstalled with a standard baseline image, the company is about to go through a forced upgrage. The new computer is going to have the latest version of MS Office installed. Since it's a new computer, someone important (management) is getting said computer. The first thing the user does is open some important Excel spreadsheet or Access database that is has been deemed critical to day-to-day operations. Because it's a new version of MS Office, the user is asked if they'd like to upgrade the format that the file is formated/saved in. Of course the user will click "OK". Now, this user is the only person that can open and edit this critical file. The next thing the user does after getting a new version of MS Office is create some Word document. As soon as the user saves this document, they email it to everyone in the company. Complaints about not being able to open this document flood the HelpDesk as soon as the user hit the Send button. Instead of complaining about how the latest version of MS Office was allowed into the company without authorization, everyone complains that "so and so has the latest version of MS Office. Why don't I have the latest version of MS Office?" And the company has to shell out $LARGE_SUM to bring everyone up-to-date with the latest version of MS Office one week after it's released.

Sinse, repeat.... has it really only been 4 years since that last forced upgrage of MS Office?

Re:This whole story is FUD.

[(H)elix1]

It's really not hard to select 'Save in Office 97-2003 format' from a drop down menu on the save dialogue.

You have the 'commercial' version of Office. One of the nasty surprises for many people I know who picked up the cheaper student/teacher version is it only saves in the Office 2007 format. The older format save is disabled.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:This whole story is FUD.

[adonoman]

Ummm... no.

I have the home/student version and I can click on the funny round office button -> Save as -> Word 97-2003 document. Plus it's trivial to go into options and set the default save format to the old style.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:prompt?

[Raideen]

I wish that the full blown Office installation would automatically convert legacy Outlook PSTs to the Unicode format for the extra storage space (20GB by default, as opposed to a 2GB limit). It would prevent me from having to do that manually after an upgrade and there's no automated conversion process [microsoft.com]. I have a problem believing his claims that the trial edition automatically converted the file, but I'll take him on his word. Anyway, you can always export back out to the legacy PST format. He just didn't notice that the PST was in the Unicode format before he uninstalled the trial, since he did the conversion using his own trial installation.

There's also the Windows Installer Cleanup tool for cleaning up failed MSI uninstallations, which is what appears to have been a large part of the problem getting Office 2000 back on to the system. For obvious reasons, Office 2000 doesn't go out of the way to detect Office 2003 installations, so the problem was probably registry cruft (as it is for so many installer issues).

Re:It is FUD... and it isn't

[man_of_mr_e]

Sorry, I call BS.

Office 2007 will save any document you open in it's original format, thus if you open an .doc file from 2003, then click save, it will re-save it in 2003 format. You have to explicitly tell it to save in .docx to get it to upgrade the format. You really don't know what you're talking about if you make this claim.

What's even more, when you install any version of Office since Office 2000, unless you tell it to delete the old version (it asks you specifically), it will install side-by-side versions, and you can run both simultaneously. I've been on the beta programs, and had to use both, so I know this to be true. There was a weird bug in Office 97 that didn't allow 2000 and 97 to be used simultaneously without some hacking, but this hasn't been true of any version since.

As for Outlook, i've downgraded PST files from both Office 2007 and Office 2003 to earlier versions without any kind of trouble, so I don't know what the author of the article is talking about. The only problem is with unicode versions, but that's a choice you can make to upgrade to that.

Re:Hacking the registry

[Anonymous Coward]

But then, the original claim was completely bogus, so the problem does not exist at all.
All the mentioned Office versions are installed with .msi packages and removing them also removes the entries from the registry.

Unless you are so stupid to just delete Program Files\Microsoft Office and call that "uninstalling", of course.

Re:M. Webster's Explains

[TheGavster]

Office 2007 doesn't overwrite your files with the new format when you edit them. There's even an option to default all NEW documents to the old format. I should mention that the 'old' .doc format is reverse compatible to Office 97. The blurb (not the article, mind) mentions only that Outlook mail files are incompatible between 2000 and 2003. Assuming that the same rift exists between 2003 and 2007 (and that 2007 doesn't include a 2003 export option (wouldn't know; I don't use Outlook)), it's certainly irritating but being that the article is about trial Office 2007 installs on new OEM computers, I'm not sure where the automatic mangling of mail is happening.

Re:M. Webster's Explains

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in addition to the path given above, on the Office main page, you could click "Downloads" [microsoft.com] and see that it's one of the top 5 Office downloads...

Or you could just go to the Microsoft Downloads [microsoft.com] page directly and note that it's the second most popular download, available right at the top of the page...

Or, you could Google "Office 2007 format [google.ca]" and see that it's in the top 10 results for that query...

Pretty complicated stuff there....

Re:Ask Science about so-called "compatibility pack

[Anonymous Coward]

So organizations that have automated processed around working with specific file formats are having trouble when a new file format is introduced. Big shock. These same fuckers also don't accept PDF, ODF, or anything that isn't Word 2000 compatible DOC.

Now the equation problem is an interesting one, but not a surprising one. Word 2007 is the first version of Office to actually introduce a native equation editor. All previous versions used OLE to embed equations edited using an external library, Microsoft Equation 3.0. Guess what, you can still use Microsoft Equation 3.0 in Word 2007 documents, then save them as Word 2003 (or earlier) documents and have them work just fine. Go to the Insert tab, under the Text section click on the Object drop down and select Object. In the dialog that appears select Microsoft Equation 3.0. Then edit the equation exactly as you did in Word 2003. I bet Nature couldn't even tell the difference.

Even more interesting is that Word 2003 didn't store equations in MathML either. They are stored as a WMF for rendering and as a COM BLOB for metadata and editing. So the comment about MathML doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The new equation editor in Word 2007 does support MathML, it's just not the underlying storage mechanism. In the Equations Tool tab (which appears when working with an equation) you can select to copy the equation to the clipboard as MathML instead of as an inline representation of the equation, and you can always copy MathML directly into Word 2007 and it will translate it just fine.

The biggest problem is not a technical problem at all. These journals have an extensive workflow based around peer review. That means different people in different organizations would have to agree to move forward almost all at once. This always happens when you build the workflow around a specific version of a specific technology instead of abstracting the workflow from the technology. Why these guys don't support even PDF for the actual submission baffles me.

As for "promises" of betas, if Microsoft has not established a solid specific release date then it is just a tentative goal and you can almost guarantee that it will slip. The developers and project managers dictate beta cycles, not the marketting droids, which is A Good Thing(TM). The damned June beta for the entities library wasn't released until July. You think they should start rushing QA just to ensure that some prerelease gets delivered to the masses before some arbitrary deadline?

Re:You are a liar

[Osty]

The reality is that you actively and continually have to work at PREVENTING 2007 from saving under the new formats. I have older Excel documents that I often work with and every single time I open them and work on them and save I get sometimes multiple warnings about various reasons why I "should" save as the new format - with defaults always set to save as the new file format

Your reality is apparently very different from my own. Just to verify that I'm not crazy, I did the following tests:

1. Create a new Word document in Word 2007 and explicitly save it as a .doc (Word 97 - Word 2003 format). Close Word, re-open Word and reload that document. Make some changes and save. No prompts, saves as .doc.
2. Create a new Excel spreadsheet in Excel 2007 and explicitly save it as a .xls (Excel 97 - Excel 2003 format). Close Excel, re-open Excel and reload that spreadsheet. Make some changes and save. No prompts, saves as .xls.
3. Open the .xls created in #2 and apply some Excel 2007-specific formatting (in this case, I marked a cell as "Good", from the Style section of the Home ribbon). Try to save. Get a warning that the 2007-specifiic formats will be lost if I continue. Options are to "Continue" (save as the old format, losing the new styles), "Cancel" (go back to the spreadsheet, where I can choose to "Save As" the new format), or "Copy to New Sheet".
4. Open the .xls created in #2, apply some formatting, and choose to Save As a text format (.txt, tab-delimited). Get a warning that the format doesn't allow multiple worksheets, with the options of "OK" (save only the active sheet) and "Cancel" (go back to the spreadsheet without saving). Choose "OK". Get another warning that the spreadsheet may contain features incompatible with the chosen format. Options are "Yes" (keep the format, losing any incompatible features), "No" (go back to the spreadsheet without saving), and "Help" (tell me what I might lose).

Tests #3 and #4 above are the only times I've ever seen any warnings on save. The warning dialogs will not allow you to accidentally convert your file to the new format. Instead, you can either save it in the format you chose without all of the formatting data, or you can cancel out and choose to "Save As" a different format.

To reiterate, there is absolutely, positively no way that you can "accidentally" save an existing file of an older format as the new .*x Office formats. You can do so intentionally by using Save As, but you can't do so accidentally. Of course Office is going to warn you that using the older format could be bad, but it's smart enough to do so only when there's a reason to give you that warning.

Obviously new documents will save in the new format unless you explicitly choose otherwise.