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Office 2003 - MS continues its consistent inconsistency
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From
07/10/2003 09:15:16
 
 
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General information
Forum:
Windows
Category:
Computing in general
Title:
Office 2003 - MS continues its consistent inconsistency
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
00835723
Message ID:
00835723
Views:
36
First the small 'issue'...
On 29 Sep I downloaded "Office 2003 Professional Enterprise" (edition?) from MSDN.
Then I noticed a note on the MSDN site that support would not be available through standard means until Oct. 1, so I elected to hold off install until then (2 more days).
Sometime later I 'heard' that the product would be available on the October disc set, so I elected to wait for that.
Yesteday the new DVDs arrived and, sure enough, there was "Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Enterprise Edition 2003" on its very own DVD.
This morning I loaded er up.
For whatever reason (particularly the word "Enterprise" in the product name) I expected that FrontPage 2003 would be included in the install. Having heard very high praise for this product I looked forward to possibly getting some use out of the product (I couldn't use the old one and so curtailed playing seriously with web development). I noticed that the word "Enterprise" did not appear in the installation dialogue, so I stopped there and pulled out the DVD and rechecked the label. It did say 'enterprise' but a restart of the install process offered no alternative install (for 'enterprise' versus 'professional') so I proceeded.
It wasn't there!

Now for the more serious issue...
When I installed Office 2000 I was asked if I wanted to keep the older version of Office (97) that was installed. I elected YES and it turned out to be a good thing that I did, because my first Word2000 document failed to print as displayed (Word 97 showed bad formatting that I was able to correct using it).
I was a bit perturbed that the O2000 install had replaced all O97 items in the Programs list with its own, so I had to go find the O97 programs and set desktop shortcuts for them.
Another "by-product" was a really odd one... I could start Word97 promptly from its shortcut regardless of what had happened before, BUT the first time (each time) that I started Word2000 AFTER having run Word97 I would get a "Preparing to install..." dialogue and it would take over a minute to become availble for use!

An install of Offie XP over O97 on another machine proved to operate the same way.

Now along comes O2003 and my installation on the system already having O97 and OXP installed.
I would have been happy to overlay OXP and keep only O97, but that option was not presented. So I opted to keep all previously installed versions. On that system I had a desktop shortcut to Word97 and the Programs list showed OXP products in it.
After the installation was completed and I rebooted (first time I remember HAVING to reboot for an Office install) I went to the Programs list and clicked Word to see what beauties would be revealed. Up came a WordXP dialogue saying "Preparing to install..." and a minute later there was Word2000 in all of it's former glory!
I closed it and then noticed that my desktop Word97 icon had changed its appearance. I d-clicked it and up came a "Preparing to install..." dialogue and 30-40 second later there was Word2003!#@#!@
It was nice to see what Word2003 looked like, but what the h*ll happened to my Word97 shortcut...who gave anyone permission to change ANYTHING on my desktop????

I closed it and d-clicked a Word document in the (Windows) Explorer display. Up came Word2000.

This all is not only marvellously inconsistent with prior releases of Office, but it leaves one in a quandry as to how to make REGULAR USE of Word2003 and all other Office 2003 products.

I may have missed something pre-install or during the install regarding this, but I did try to stay attentive and read what I could when something was offered.
All in all the Office 2003 product may be an excellent one but it sure got off on the wrong foot here.

cheers, and may you have better luck than I have had.

UPDATE:
1) The install also got rid of the Microsoft Outlook icon that I had on the desktop. It had warned that older Outlook would have to be deinstalled, so that is not an issue. BUT is is odd that the install replaced my Word97 icon with the Word2003 icon yet did NOT replace the Outlook icon with the new version's icon.
2) I did find an entry called "Microsoft Office" in the Programs list and it does have O2003 products in the sub-list. Thanks for letting me know, MS.
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