Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I can't speak for the other components of MS Office such as Outlook, Microsoft does provide a compatibility pack for word, excel and powerpoint formats which allow someone with an older version of office (XP) view the newer documents.
In fairness, I have not used the trial version of Office 2007.
How, then, is this even a story? The submitter warns of the impending danger of the 07 trial, goes over his experiences with the 03 trial, and then admits he hasn't even tried the 07 trial.
A friend of mine bought a Toshiba Satellite with vista from Best Buy, and it came preinstalled with the Office 2007 trial. He used it for a week. He then uninstalled the 2007 trial via the control panel, installed his retail license of 2003 (he was not a fan of the ribbon...), and imported his files without any compatibility issues, including his entire Outlook file, contacts, email, everything.
I encountered no difficulties when switching from the Office 2007 trial to OpenOffice.org. It's funny, OpenOffice.org in no way supports the 2007 file format. What happens with Outlook I'm not sure, but the rest of the Office suite doesn't convert any files unless you choose to. It's really not hard to select 'Save in Office 97-2003 format' from a drop down menu on the save dialogue.
trial
Function: noun
Etymology: Anglo-French, from trier to try
3: a test of faith, patience, or stamina through subjection to suffering or temptation; broadly : a source of vexation or annoyance
The article doesn't say anything regarding the behavior of Office 2007 when installed on a machine with an older version of Office. It's a bare-bones commentary on OEM installations of trials of Office 2007. There is absolutely no indication that the problems encountered by the submitter will come up again.
So, this scare-tactic post amounts to someone asserting that something bad happened in the past, and might, possibly, maybe, could happen in the future.
Wow, thanks for the information, I never would have thought of that on my own.
(Furthermore, does any company that uses trial-ware want you to do anything besides buy the software? Game companies use demos all of the time, AND THEY DON"T WANT YOU TO CONSIDER BUYING THE GAME TO BE OPTIONAL EITHER. But, because this is and MS story on Slashdot, we just have to bash them for every perfectly normal thing that they do.)
Pathetic.
Ever hear of backups? You know...the thing you do to data before installing a new piece of software? Yeah Outlook 2003 changes the .pst file, but so what? If you took the extra few seconds to copy it before installing 2003 you wouldn't have this problem now, would you? BTW a .pst file is something you ought to be backing up ANYWAY unless you really don't need to read those saved e-mails again. Disk failure, anyone?
I also have both Outlook 2000 and 2003 clients in an Exchange environment and there is no problem with individual users using either version. The only real source of grief are occasional MINOR formatting hiccups when files are opened with different versions and documents that reference a database for merging purposes, but these are merely annoyances, not critical failures.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Well, maybe YOU would touch it with a ten foot pole, but I surely wouldn't!
I thought the lessons were generally accepted by this time and for the most part, I think they are. When Windows XP came out, people switched over fairly quickly, but business was a bit slower to migrate. Vista gets released and I have yet to see a business site actually migrate over though I have witnessed a few individuals giving Vista a try... some going back to XP; some still trying to learn Vista's quirks. But so far, there's no business case for rolling out Vista.
The same goes for rolling out Office 2007. I don't see a business case for it. I have known one business to start migrating over to Office 2007 because there is some collaboration tool they've just *got* to have. I think it's a mistake. But then again, this is a decision made by the same IT "MCSE" leadership that couldn't manage to get Exchange 2003 successfully installed and "lost" their Blackberry server CDs... (As if they couldn't download the software from RIM's site.)
If there is a business case for Office 2007 or for Vista, I'd be really happy to hear it. But for the moment, I see no functions or features that we need to get our work done or that could help us get it done any better.
Speculation is a great thing, but it quickly loses its luster when stated as fact. The little disclaimer you stuck on the bottom should be right under the headline.
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.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
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 $LARGE_SUM to bring everyone up-to-date with the latest version of MS Office one week after it's released.
Sinse, repeat.... has it really only been 4 years since that last forced upgrage of MS Office?
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
So you can choose if you want the backward compatible version or the new version, and it is easy to know what you chose. Currently we have a some Office 2007 at work but mostly Office 2003. No problems thus far, as the 2007 people know to keep using the old formats and everyone is happy.
The menu for types is confusing and makes interchange a PITA. There are three options, "default", "Office97-2003" and "other". If this version is like all of the rest, conversion is one way - in but not out - and 97-2003 will be a mess. The other formats are way too confusing for the average user with multiple types defined for the same version of word processor name. Once you get past all of that, you have Vista's default behavior of hiding file extensions to keep you from knowing which file is what.
All of this confusion and complexity has one aim: to make sure people buy a new M$ word processor every few years. The file formats change around to keep other programs from being able to use them. The new formats themselves are used to force others to buy Word. This routine has worked several times.
The only real question is how many times can M$ pull the old switcheroo before people revolt. It's such a transparent rip off.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Also, IIRC Outlook 2003 has a downgrader for .pst to the earlier versions, in the File menu.
Slashdot: Your source of daily anti-Microsoft FUD. I'm going to get modded down as troll/flamebait for this and probably lose my karma bonus, but I've noticed kdawson is the worst. Sorry to call you out.
I use 2002 at work and 2003 on all my home/school machines. I can't for the life of me imagine a scenario where Office has or should be changed dramatically enough requiring an upgrade to 2007. I'm assuming that a few years out there will still be a student version of Office for about $100 where you get to install it on any 3 machines simultaneously. If not, and I doubt it, given the big presence Office has in college bookstores, which is the only reason now to specifically replace a machine or buy a new one, I'll just put on whatever Open Office is current and point it to store in Office 2002/3 formats. If the latest formats are an absolute requirement because of some dumbass teacher then I assume the school will provide a discounted version to support it. Just because Redmond thinks they can force you to upgrade, there aren't too many circumstances where they can.
I have used Office 2007 some, and found that I benefited from the improvements (things like more than 3 ways to sort in excel), but what I really noticed is when I compared it to my trial of OpenOffice. It was unbelievable how many little shortcuts that make using Excel so much easier didn't exist in OpenOffice. Just the different ways to handle copy/pastes and functions, I felt that using Openoffice was a much more arduous task than using Excel. I also noticed that the performance was much worse using Openoffice than Excel on a windows machine, the performance was a little better between windows and linux (for OOo) but still not as good as Excel 2003 in Windows. Am I the only person who has seen this? Or is there a larger issue at stake? I've seen how much every business uses Excel, and feel that if they can't solve these little problems, that OpenOffice will never have a chance to steal significant market share from MSFT
The entire Office UI team, that's who. Ever seen that Customer Experience Improvement Program that you probably disable? Well, they collected and analysed data, and found that people simply weren't discovering Office features. The Ribbon is a good way to expose these features for everyone. If you take the time to learn it and then customise it, you may easily change your opinion.
If you're having difficulty locating commands, check the Office website http://office.microsoft.com/ for an interactive demonstration: choose the Office 2003 command, and it will show you how to get to it 2007.
mainly because it's not widely appreciated that it can be difficult to go back to the older file format.
To my astonishment, within a couple of hours Brian Jones, who is a program manager working on the Office XML functionality had posted a comment to the blog to point out the 27 Meg compatibility pack. http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/03/ 12/how-to-create-and-consume-openxml-formats.aspx
Wow, this is a little law student website on the other side of the planet from Microsoft, and they have Office program managers patrolling cyberspace looking for any negative comments ?
When I was still working at Dell(not to long ago) it was a big problem because we would load it onto the computers if you didn't order any processing software. There was nothing indicating that the software was trial software and when office 2007 first came out we would have someone get escalated to me about every other week because they couldn't get there files. Pretty much all of them thought it was pretty low.
"Journals (Science [biggest journal, of the America Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)], and Nature) have prohibited taking OOXML documents, because they do not correspond to existing standards such as MathML and SVG and are not backwards compatible to Word 2003 and previous. Compatibility packs do not even help.[2][3] As Microsoft will stop selling Word 2003 by July 1, 2007[4], this is a very bad precedent for future-proofing documents.
. dtl "Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science"
.docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision."
p -marked-down.html "Math markup marked down"0 07/06/04/scientists_hold_off_on_that_upgrade_to_of fice_2007.html
p plications/the_pointless_office_converter_delay.ht ml "The Pointless Office Converter Delay"
1] http://www.sciencemag.org/about/authors/prep/docx
"Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new
"Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 -- for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us -- was not designed to be compatible with MathML."
[3]http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/04/math-marku
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/12608/1023/
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/2
Nature's analysis of OOXML:
"We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature's own editing and typesetting programs"
[4] http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=519 "July 1: No more Office 2003 for OEMs" by Mary Jo Foley"
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/business_a
"Two important Microsoft topics--interoperability and Office file formats--intersect on the Mac desktop, and they brutally cross like swords.
Two weeks ago, Microsoft broke a promise made in December: The spring beta release of OOXML (Office Open XML) converters for Mac Office. "
Sorry, I call BS.
.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.
Office 2007 will save any document you open in it's original format, thus if you open an
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.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
From the web site that is allowing you to try MS Office 2007 - there is a FAQ ! http://us1.trymicrosoftoffice.com/faq.aspx?culture =en-US
"How do I uninstall the trial ..." is the question that would address this issue.
--
The premise for this slashdot story is analogous to "My great grandpa got his arm broke hand cranking one of those Ford horseless carriages. So you should be wary of the 2008 Ford products, or your arm could wind up busted."
It would seem, (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/9280 91), that you can install both Office 2003 and 2007 on the same system. Personally, I think you'd be nuts to do it, but if you want to trial and compare features....
Should not be trialing s/w on your production system anyway IMHO.
If you must, backup everything first, and just keep a copy of your email messages on the server. If you have to downgrade afterwards, restore your old outlook *.pst files and re-download the new mails. You'll not get the 'sent' mails, tho..
Slashdot resorts to making crap up?
/. headlines can we expect next?
..................
What in the hell is happening to this site. Once a good source of fairly trusted information or stories from around the net and now we are finding duplicates of stories everyday, biased submitter comments that don't even understand the articles they are posting and NOW we get opinion on subjects that are complete incompetence or flat out lies.
How can someone talk about using 2007 Office when they admit they never used it?
How can we trust an article where the user is SO STUPID that they reinstalled Office to import data when the software installed ALREADY does this automatically if they would just have freaking looked at the options instead of assuming MS is evil and forcing users to into their software.
This isn't even about MS or Office or Office 2007. This is about an really incompetent computer user proporting themselves as an 'expert' and yet having less knowledge than an average user in the same circumstances.
Do you think MS would bait people with a new version of Office and then want to pay for 'free' support calls to get the users back to their original versions? Just from a $$ standpoint, this would be STUPID for MS to do, and why this DOES NOT happen as the submitted story suggests.
Slashdot, this is now to the point where your main articles are making up crap just to try to push the anti-MS FUD.
So what insane
"Don't install evil Vista because my 3yr old ate keys off the keyboard"
"Don't use evil Windows Server, when I installed NT 3.51 Server my audio in doom stopped working"
"Stay away from MS, I drove by their headquarters and bigfoot attacked my car and raped me"
"I am too stupid to breathe most of the time, but after installing Vista, I forgot how to breathe altogether"
"MS forces evil DRM on me in Vista because it has something called protect processes that secures parts of the OS from other processes, and even though it wasn't designed for DRM, idiots like me see it as DRM because we are too f**king stupid to know what we are talking about"
Geesh
My experience was this: I had a new PC with Office 2003 trial, and wanted to use my old version of Office to begin with. As such, I installed my earlier version of Office. The two programs would not coexist well at all. Office 2003 consistently annoyed me with unexpected attempts to start up.
As far as I could figure out, Office 2003 maps registry keys that earlier versions of Office 2000 do not. The result is that you can't effectively have Office 2003 and an earlier version of Office on the same PC, with the earlier version having preference. Every so often, the new version of Office would be started via one of the new registry keys, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I even refused to click Agree on th EULA, and Excel 2003 eventually decided to run anyway.
The solution was to uninstall both Office 2003 and the earlier version of Office, and then reinstall the desired version of Office. Currently, I just uninstall the trial versions of Office immediately, and do not allow them to run even once. This seems to work fairly well.
The original poster was essentially correct. If you do not know enough to uninstall all versions of Office, and then install the desired version, then you will have problems. If you try to "manually correct" things, you will probably wind up reinstalling Windows XP. Myself, I think if you want to have multiple versions of Office on the same PC, you probably want to install virtualization software like VMWware.
To this date, I still have not deliberately used Office 2003 or agreed to its EULA, and I haven't missed it either.
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?
Wasn't Microsoft nailed a few years back for sending free copies of their new versions of Office to company heads?
They'd install their free version of Office, produce multitudes of documents using the updated format (which was illegible by all previous versions of Office), and force the company to upgrade hundreds of other licenses just so they could read what their superiors were sending them.
This "die before you buy" technique doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
Your reality is apparently very different from my own. Just to verify that I'm not crazy, I did the following tests:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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".
- 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.
I didn't even get this far.
I bought a new laptop and once home and through the setup process, I began to remove those applications I did not need. I need the Windows OS, but I use all other OpenSource Apps. There are two Office 2007 entries. One is for the Office 2007 Trial Activation and the other is for the 2007 Trial Student Edition. The Trial Activation program will not uninstall as there isn't a "version" of Office installed. I had already uninstalled the trial office, and the solution was to re-install the trial software and then remove the Activation App. I tried that, and even went so far as to download and install the trial standard edition -- the activation app would not uninstall at all.
Seems that Microsoft wants a reminder that you need Office 2007 and will not let you clean up the programs on "your" computer. It really is one step closer to not being "Where do you want to go today?" but "Here is where we will let you go..."
Sig? What's a Sig?