Opening word 97-2003 documents in word 07

Ok, here is my problem. Recently I had to reformat my hard-drive in my Dell E1705. Previously I had office 2007 on there and could open word 97-2003 documents fine. As in when I clicked the document icon in the folder, word would open up and the document would come up.

However, since the reformt, when I click the icon for a document that was made in word 97-2003 only word opens up. The document does not actually appear. It is just a word 2007 window, not even a blank document. I then have to manually click the "pearl" and go to "open document" and get the word 97-2003 file open that way. This only seems to happen with word. My powerpoint lectures from class are in the same 97-2003 format and still open up just fine in powerpoint 07. I have reinstalled office 07 as well and did a complete install for all features and this did not fix the problem.

This is not a big deal, but being that it used to open fine before the reformat by just clicking the icon, I would like t get it back that way. Has anyone else come across this problem. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

 

???? this ????
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...87-8732-48D5-8689-AB826E7B8FDF&displaylang=en

cheers ...

 

Nah, thats for older versions of office.

Is your copy of office legit? maybe its some part of microsoft's anti piracy kicking in.

 

then it should block the whole thing ...

cheers ...

 

try running windows update and updating Office....or try repairing it using the disc.

 

You could try (from within Word) Help menu > Detect and Repair. I'm not sure how this is situated in 2007, but it should be there. See if that fixes anything. As you stated, there shouldn't be a problem opening those documents.

Also, you could try this...

Go to the Start Menu and type the following into the search box: normal.dot

You may have to click "Search Everywhere" as the file may have a temporary clone already open, and both may be hidden files. When you find them, either rename the files or delete them. "normal.dot" is the global template. If that becomes corrupt, it can cause issues like this among many others. If Word does not find the file, it will automatically re-create it from defaults, which is what we want to accomplish.

You could also try running the registry cleanup in CCleaner, though reg cleaners are very hit-and-miss.