Did a bonehead thing: Installed Office 2007

OMG! This thing is an obese, slow pig!

I wish I had never installed it, it's so friggen bad, especially when mated to Windows Desktop Search, which indexes all the time, even when in "Snooze" mode. STAY AWAY!

So, now I need to go back to Office 2003. Does anyone know if the 2007 .pst file will open in 2003? I can't find anything online about this topic.

Please let me know if you've done something like this. And take my advice, DON'T! Microsoft is a friggen disaster!!!!

 

I haven't had any trouble with Office 2007...

Anyways, as far as I know, yes, Office 2003 will open 2007 documents.

 

Depends if you save it as a doc or a docx file :X

 

Office 2007 .pst files are not compatible with 2003. It very seldom works that way. New versions can usually read older versions, but not vice versa.

There appears to be a fix according to This Microsoft Knowledgebase Article.

Hope it helps. (And, I'll switch from XP to Vista long before I'll switch from Office 2003. Ribbons belong on gifts. Not productivity suites.)

 

What are the specs of your computer? I've been running Office 2007 on my desktop, which is an athlon 64 3400+ with 1.5GB of RAM, and just recently on a Sony SZ460 with a T7200 C2D and 2GB of RAM, and I've found the performance to be just fine (definitely no worse than Office 2003).

Maybe there's something else wrong?

 

Office 2003 will still open it if it's a .docx file. It will just download a converter off of Microsoft's website and use that to open the file.

Personally, I love the changes they've made to Office 2007. It's fast on my computer, and really fits what I need for a productivity suite.

 

OK, thanks for the information folks. I just sent that question to tech support too, and I'll report on what they say. I'm sure I'm not the first one to bring this up.

I'm only concerned with the .pst file, because I have saved all the other docs (only two sofar) in 2003 format, so no worries there.

I'm running it on a 1.6Ghz ASUS W5F. Obviously, I need to lot more horsepower, but I'm waiting for the V2 to arrive.

I'm glad some of you like Office 2007, I don't mind the interface at all, it's a plus, but I will not sacrifice it for performance.

However, I do have something to add. I just removed Windows Desktop Search and the computer is noticeable easier to use, so it must have been that POS!

 

It was probably indexing all your files... that would be quite a resource hog.

 

I would venture a guess that something outside the influence of Office 2K7 was causing the perf slow down. I've gone and deployed the new Office to my entire home network, including the wife's laptop which is an older Dell 700m with a 1st gen Centrino CPU. Aside from a bit of griping of getting used to the new Ribbon (She loves it now) I haven't gotten any complaints about slowness or file compatibility (though she's not a heavy PPT user and when she does use it, she's doing a presentation and not distributing the file itself).

 

dam, microsoft is blowing it. Vista and office 2007 suck. Xp and office 2003 is still the best.

 

This wouldn't be so bad if the upgrade cycles were a few years apart, but to have labored on this for nearly five years and still deliver a marginally improved yet poorly optimized suite is simply inexcusable.

 

I don't know, I'm not a big fan of MS by any means, but I personally think they did a really nice job with Office 2007.

 

That's what you get when you have a 70,000-employee monopoly: a lot of hot air and very little in the way of true innovation.

 

Microsoft Office 2007 should not be substantially slower than Office 2003. It probably is something else that is causing your system to slow down. As previous posters have said, they have installed office 2007 on older and slower computers and have not had any problems.

 

And like I said in the post a few above that is was Windows Desktop Search that was sucking wind out of the system, even in "snooze" mode.

That said, Office 2007 is still slower than 2003. Also note that the rendering engine for Outlook is now permanently Word, from IE, which has had a lot of implications for rendering HTML, and which is decidedly poorer.

 

OK, after several go-around e-mails, a Microsoft tech support person told me that Office 2007 .pst files can be read by Office 2003.

I'm not sure whether to believe her or not, but there you have it! We can go back. Now the question is, is it worth it, because what if it don't work?

 

I've got office 2007 (student and teacher) or home and student whatever they have watered it down to (won it) and it is slower than 2003. It also took up a whole 1GB of my C drive which I'm not happy about. So I've got both 2003 and 2007 installed becuase i wanted outlook and publisher and access.

you just cant win.....

 

office 2007 is very on my laptop.

you can open office 2007 docs in office 2003 only if you have saved them in "1997-2003 document" option which you can access in "save as" option in 2007 office.

 

office 2007 runs great on my notebook

bohoo... even better i rather not see a full webpage when i open to read my email.

 

Yea, that's not the problem, everyone!!!! I'm saving all my Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in 2003 compatible format, not XML.

However, I'm talking exclusively about MICROSOFT OUTLOOK .PST files!!!! Sorry, about the yelling, but I've had several of you suggest the same thing and that's NOT WHAT IT'S ABOUT!

 

Was this knowledge base article of no help? It sounds like it addresses your problem. It is .pst specific.

 

According to that article, it does appear that both file types are the same. I wonder, but I'm very hesitant to move back to 2003, it's such a hassle!

 

Am I the only one that finds this surprising? I really like Office 2007. The ribbon is very well designed and makes working much faster and more intuitive. I love that I can do superscript with one button now rather than 6 clicks. I don't find it slow at all, either. All-in-all, I'm very pleased. I'm not even a shill for microsoft.

 

i recently installed Office 2007 Enterprise and it works well for me. Yet i had to upgrade my patches to SP2 but that was no biggie and my old Sony with P4 2.8ghz 1g ram runs every Office application fine.

 

Office 2007 has a Home & Student offering for a not-so-unreasonable price. Comes with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote. No Outlook. (not that you'd want it anyway unless you had a PocketPC).

Just installed it. Hope I don't regret it... doesn't seem there is a "Classic" mode like the Start Menu in XP... at least you can tell it to save as .doc files by default rather than .docx files...

 

The main performance hang-up is that, unlike Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 seizes the entire system when it checks e-mail. Literally, freezing the system. That you all wouldn't notice that seems odd to me, given the enormous amount of micro-managed, control-freakism that goes on here ordinarily.

 

I spoke too soon... this Home & Student one has a "non-commercial use" tag stuck to the title bar. Grrr...

 

I've been using Office 2007 for about 4 or 5 months (I started with the beta version) and I can't imagine going back to 2003. For the guy that said "ribbons belong on gifts", you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about. Office 2007 is an evolutionary improvement over 2003. I don't use outlook so I can't speak about the presence, or lack, of bugs in Outlook 2007. But as far as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are concerned, I have not encountered a single bug; even after extensive use.

For anyone that wants to get a feel for the new Office, you can download a two month free trial from Microsoft. It takes a few days to get used to the ribbons but, once you are used to them, the ribbons are HUGE improvement over the traditional menus. Going back to 2003 feels like going from Windows 95 to back to 3.1 (for those who remember the difference).

-Adrian


P.S. I can't stand Luddites!

 

I agree with you that interface-wise this is quite an improvement. And I imagine that if I did have to switch back, 2003 would look primitive, so I haven't. I'm going to gamble that getting a faster ASUS V2 will improve usability. At least I'm hoping that it will.

 

Vindication, at last! Grappling with you guys made me think I was nuts, but I've finally been proven right: Outlook 2007 slows down dramatically for people with big mailboxes:

http://www.itwriting.com/blog/?p=54

I have a 3GB Outlook file with nearly 10,000 e-mails in the deleted folder, and an equal amount in the sent folder. I'm glad I'm not the only suffering anymore.

 

I was using 2k7 on my laptop, my laptop needed to be rmaed, I was able to save my school work using a sata to usb cable; however, I did not convert the documents. I was forced to put together a machine out of spare parts, and install 2k7. The Barton which is running on an old asus 133-c (sd-ram) is clocked at appox 1.3ghz. I have 512mb of SD ram, and Office runs fine. However, photoshop cs2, not as amazing

 

Yes, saving any docs in the 2003 format is what I'm doing. The tech-support woman, who is the best I've ever run into, has helped me profusely with things like turning off all the add-ins or creating a new profile, but in the end, once the spam starts flowing in, Outlook simply chokes.

I gather Outlook 2007's spam filter was hacked at the last moment and not put through QA, which is why it freezes the system. I could, I guess, archive all my old e-mails and start from scratch, but the thought of that is also not cool with me.

 

And I can't stand presumptuous gits. Yes, I do know what I'm talking about. Like many things in life, software preferences are just that: preferences.

It's just hippity-skippity wonderful that you and many other like Office 2007. You stated an opinion, I stated one.

After trying 2007 for two months, I much prefer my own modified toolbars, menus, and macros in 2003. I haven't had to use 6 clicks to get to anything in Office in years and have had no issues with Office 2003 stability.

 

there's a computability kit for office 2003 to read everything

 

OK, here's an update folks! I successfully was able to uninstall just Outlook 2007 and reinstall Outlook 2003 and the .pst file opened just fine.

It was a great relief to see the program open correctly. But when the e-mails started flying in at hyperspeed, I was truly happy!

I decided I can live with the slow-pokedness of PowerPoint, since I don't use it *every* day. Word and Excel 2007 are fine.

For you people with 1GB and greater .pst files, I think the above strategy is best. Besides, Outlook 2007 was upgraded minimally anyway.

 

Using the 2007 Home & Student version, I only get Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote. Thing is, my iPaq came with 2002 Outlook, so I'm set.

Anyway, this docx file seems to be nothing more than a ZIP file named .docx with XML and other graphic files in it...

 

I have recently installed the Enterprise edition of Office 2007. And my initial reaction was... where the hell is everything I am use to. It didn't take me long to use to the new interface. I have had no issues during my first week of using it. I am running Office 2007 on my Asus G1 laptop with Vista Home Premium installed and I have not complaints.

I don't use Outlook on my laptop, but I do use Access 2007 and of course word and excel.

No complaints.

 

Outlook 2003 runs fine. Like I said above, it's big .pst files that will cause you problems, if you don't have that, or use Outlook, you won't have any problems.

Since few people use PowerPoint as extensively as I do, I'm a professional speaker, you won't know about that either. It just crashed, and it hosed my six last additions. Oh well, like I also said before, it's great to see what $6 billion will buy you these days at Microsoft.