I recently upgraded to Office 2011 for Mac; I still have Office 2004 in my apps file.
Is there any reason to keep Office 2004, or should I just move it to the trash file?
2004 won’t even run on Lion, so I’d just trash it.
Answering from a PC perspective.
Saying “trash” devalues the work of programers and suggests that their work was valueless. You should say “uninstall,” implying that you could still… could still… wait. Wrong kind of PC.
About four years ago I upgraded from Word 2000 to 2007 and chose the ‘keep the old install’ option. I use Word extensively (write/edit for a living), and constantly collaborate with multiple authors all over the world (i.e. sharing files with a variety of platforms). Further, these files get sent for publishing, meaning they get laid out in InDesign or Quark.
A few times I’ve had to point pre-docx users to the read/write patch, which was easy for them to install (this was for files that were already in docx; Word allows saving to the .doc format).
That’s about it. I’ve never loaded the old version. No, wait. I think I may have once or twice during the transition (wanting to work on files that needed quick turnaround and I wasn’t sure how to use the confounded Ribbon yet), but that’s it.
The only difference/feature that I miss are ‘walking ants’ and other text animations. Useful for drawing the attention of particularly … slow … clients to something in particular when a comment just won’t do.
thanks, guys.
so I’ll be able to open all my old .doc files in Word 11? I thought MS wasn’t keeping everything old in the new version, leading to compatibility probs? or have I got that muddled?
Again, Word 2007 is what my experience is based on, but yes, you should be able to open open open everything. The “Open” dialogue is pretty extensive.
[NP in Court] “Yes, m’lord, if I could refer you to the quotation on p. 27 of my brief.”
[Judge] “There’s no quotation there, Mr Piper.”
[NP] “I believe your lordship is looking at my Book of Authorities. Page 27 of my brief.”
[Judge] “Still not seeing any quotation?”
[NP] “Perhaps your Lordship could look at the electronic version?”
[Judge] “Eh? oh yes, the one with the little red things moving about it? They rather look like ants, Mr Piper?”
[NP] “Precisely, my lord.”
I work in a mostly Mac school district. The day after we started installing Office 11 on our machines we got two or three calls about .doc files that wouldn’t open. The error message said the files were damaged. We had to show people how to explicitly open them in Word 09. It’s only been a few, but they were all “extremely important” files.
and how do you “explicitly open” such files?
I just noticed I said Office 09 when I meant Office 08.
When you double-click a document it opens with the ‘default application’. If you have Office 11 installed, Word 11 will be the default application for .doc files.
To explicitly open it with a different app you need to either open the app first and use its file>open menu to open the document, or right-click (or control-click) the document and select Open With and select the app.
Word 11 is Microsoft Word(14.X.X) , Word 08 is Microsoft Word (12.X.X), Word 04 is Microsoft Word(11.X.X). The numbers where the Xs are depend on whether you’ve kept up with updates.
thanks!