Office 2003 and Office 2007 on the same computer

Although it might sound strange, some people need both versions of Microsoft's Office suite because of the many changes in some programs. Also, it seems there are still some compatibility issue. For example a document made in Office 2007, saved as .doc and opened with office 2003 might have some small differences which for some are annoying. Even more, if two or more ar working on the same project and don't have same version it gets quite frustrating.

This is the way to have them installed on the same machine. However I have tested it for Word, Excel and PowerPoint ONLY. The other might also work and... for sure, two versions of Outlook will definetly NOT work so watch out!

In my case, the computer already had Office 2007 installed. I've added 2003 edition in the same partition but in a different folder (C:/Program Files/Microsoft Office03). Choose custom installation so that I could choose only those three above.

After the succesful installation I had a .docx document-> right clicked -> open with and had Microsoft Word two time but with different icons. Opened it with 2003. No problems. Afterwards I selected 2007 edition and a setup window appeared and after a while it was gone. However, Word 2003 was not in the open with options and I could not use it to open it anymore.

Therefore the proper way is, after installing it (I did a repair so it's the same thing), don't open anything, hit 'windows key' + 'r' or select "Start" and "Run" and type

* reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\word\Options /v NoReReg /t REG_DWORD /d 1

* reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\word\Options /v NoReReg /t REG_DWORD /d 1

I entered only the second one, 12.0 that stands for Office 2007 because that was the one which cauzed trouble but in other cases might very well be the other way around.

Fact is, after this it worked without issues. My thanks go to David Overton.

V
[ Versiunea in limba romana pe RGSTUFF.ro ]
And again another warning: DO NOT INSTALL Outlook 2007 and 2003 on the same machine.