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

Posted by kdawson on from the don't-get-fooled-again dept.

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.

21 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. prompt? by timmarhy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    when you go to save over a doc with a newer version it prompts you. it's not MS's fault if your too spastic to read what it says.

    --
    If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
    1. Re:prompt? by Duhavid · · Score: 4, Informative

      "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"

      --
      emt 377 emt 4
    2. Re:prompt? by Osty · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:prompt? by Raideen · · Score: 4, Informative

      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. 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).

  2. Compatibility pack for 2007 by hiroller · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Didn't even try Office 07! by Coopjust · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. This whole story is FUD. by x_MeRLiN_x · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:This whole story is FUD. by adonoman · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  5. M. Webster's Explains by soloport · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

    1. Re:M. Webster's Explains by timmarhy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      why would you think if you save over your document in one format, uninstalling said program would roll back your files as well?

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      If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
    2. Re:M. Webster's Explains by ben+there... · · Score: 4, Insightful

      why would you think if you save over your document in one format, uninstalling said program would roll back your files as well?

      You'd think that something as important as a "standard" document format wouldn't change enough to become incompatible every 1-4 years.
    3. Re:M. Webster's Explains by smookumy · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, you're right. The bastards lock me into their upgrade cycle.. every 5 years I have to write a cheque for 0 dollars. /The bastards/

    4. Re:M. Webster's Explains by ben+there... · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Oh give me a break! how can you add new features to a product without changing the format, and rending it unreadable by OLD software?

      Can you open an XHTML 1.0 web page designed now in an HTML 3.2 browser from 1997 (10 years ago)? Yes, you usually can.

      Any "standard" document format should never become unreadable by old software.

      i bet the first open office release isn't capable of opening the latest? oh the HORROR! evil open office lets bash them!

      I'm not a user of OpenOffice, so I won't comment on that. But I've never had a problem opening TXT or RTF or HTML or PDF. I look forward to the day when the most common rich word processing format is also the most compatible.
    5. Re:M. Webster's Explains by kennygraham · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Can you open an XHTML 1.0 web page designed now in an HTML 3.2 browser from 1997 (10 years ago)?

      XHTML 1.0? If you're careful to follow the backward compatibility guidelines.
      XHTML 1.1? Not if served properly.
      XHTML 2 (whenever it comes out)? no.

    6. Re:M. Webster's Explains by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displa ylang=en

      Wow would you look at that... you don't actually have to upgrade in order to open new Office files! Just another case of Microsoft forcing people to not necessarily upgrade!

  6. What? by oddman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. Scare Tactics by Dukaso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. The entire "story" is FUD by sid0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:The entire "story" is FUD by sid0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, one side is dishonest spin -- the OSS side. Take this article as an example. This has *absolutely nothing* to do, either with the linked article (which details trials on BRAND NEW PCs), or with Office 2007. In my dictionary, this is known as creating fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of any people who might want to try it out. FUD for short.

      As an aside: Most of the rambling points about Vista (no new features, less secure than XP, UAC pops up incessantly, for example) are objectively, demonstrably, and almost completely false. When you challenge objective truths, you are either ignorant or malicious. I'd wager the latter.

  9. Ask Science about so-called "compatibility pack" by january05 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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.

    1] http://www.sciencemag.org/about/authors/prep/docx. 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"

    "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 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-markup -marked-down.html "Math markup marked down"
            http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/12608/1023/
    http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/20 07/06/04/scientists_hold_off_on_that_upgrade_to_of fice_2007.html

    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_ap plications/the_pointless_office_converter_delay.ht ml "The Pointless Office Converter Delay"

    "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. "

  10. Slashdot resorts to making crap up? by TheNetAvenger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Slashdot resorts to making crap up?

    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 /. headlines can we expect next?

    "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 ..................