Office 2007

I recently restored my computer and when I went back to reinstall Office from the school server I noticed that they had 2007 for download...so of course I installed it!  Anyway, I should have known if I was going to write a paper or do a PowerPoint presentation on the new version that there might be problems opening them at school.

It turns out my school lab does have some 2007 applications but PowerPoint isn't one of them (weird).  I couldn't open my paper in Word either so there must have been a problem with that too.  Luckily I had my computer and I was able to plug that in to the projector.

If you're giving a presentation using PowerPoint 2007 you might want to consider different formats.  I haven't really checked it out but there might be a way to save a PPT in 2003 version from 2007.  I know old versions of Access had this option, of course I didn't consider this come crunch time.  There's always creating a web version of your PPT, they're just not very compact but you could use the web page locally from a flash drive or upload it to a server (if an internet connection is available).  It just goes to show that you can never be too prepared for presentations...every problem you didn't think of will probably happen when you're up there.

Anyway, if you're thinking about upgrading, have upgraded, or manage public computers you should probably consider this.  Office 2007, as usual, does not open in Office 2003.  There is a conversion option that 2003 users can download, but I was in my school lab and installing things wasn't really an option (the file they direct you to is a .exe).

This is also something you don't think about when you've upgraded, but if you send a 2007 version in an email to somebody who has 2003 then it may be a minor annoyance to them, especially if they don't have the option to download the conversion either.

There might be some conversion issues the other direction too, I didn't have any problems opening old files, but one Excel file would keep trying to send error reports to Microsoft after I converted it and then tried to close it.  There's nothing wrong with the data in the file though, it's just annoying.

I just don't understand why Microsoft can't release applications that are backwards compatible...grrr.

Oh and I just wanted to throw this out there because I'm proud of it...after I restored my computer I decided that I was no longer going to install any "questionably obtained" software on my computer.  For the applications that I really wanted I was able to find some decent open source alternatives for them...especially Dreamweaver, which is the one that I really didn't want to get rid of.  Instead of Dreamweaver I've been trying out Aptana.  I've used it a few times to finish up my class website project but I really like it.  I even prefer how it handles ftp over Dreamweaver.  For Photoshop I installed GIMP, but I haven't played around with it at all yet.  I also just completely gave up on Acrobat, I use PDF Converter to print PDF and I use Foxit Reader to read PDF.  Those are the major ones, most of the other applications I had installed for the Adobe and Dreamweaver suites I just didn't use so I haven't gone out looking for alternatives for them.

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