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Morning

Has anyone sucessfully installed Word 2007 in parallel with Word 2003 and used Flare to publish to both Word 2003 or Word 2007 (straight to PDF). Is this even possible? Apparently it's possible to install 2007 and keep the 2003 install, but how does this affect Flare? If I had 2007 installed, would Flare always use that to publish or can I choose? Sorry - it's not strictly a Flare question, I'm just wondering if anyone has done it and if it worked (and how).

Thanks in advance

With Word 2007, you have the option to save as .doc (the Word 2003 format), so I don't think you really need both versions installed. But I do know that you need Word 2007 for the PDF option in Flare to work (from Word).

Thanks for your reply. The only reason I want both versions is I don't particularly like the interface in 2007, hence I want to keep my trusty 2003 near by for now!

There are plugins to update the 2007 user interface to the 2003 look&feel.

RamonS wrote:There are plugins to update the 2007 user interface to the 2003 look&feel.

Oh okay, thanks. No excuse then. I guess I'll have to take the plunge.

Also, if you save a Word 2007 file in .doc format afaik you can still open it in 2003. So you could use either version to generate output from Flare then open it in 2003 if you wanted.

KevinDAmery wrote:Also, if you save a Word 2007 file in .doc format afaik you can still open it in 2003.

Not cleanly. If you open it in 2007 then resave it as a 2003 doc, then it behaves a bit better. For instance, someone gave me a 2007 file and I couldn't even click on a picture in the file, let alone modify it or even look at its properties. When the document was resaved in 2003 format, then I could get to the pictures. There are probably other problems with opening a 2007 file in 2003 -- that just happened to be the first one I had, and it was a fairly big one, since I needed to copy the picture of that file and I couldn't even select it.

Unless things have changed with the advent of 2007, I don't believe you can install multiple versions of an Office program. At least, that's what our IT team told me when I asked for 2000 + 2003.

I'm 98% sure you can install 2003 and 2007 in parallel if that helps. Just click the "Custom" install and there's an option in there apparently (others have got it working).

However I've decided not to upgrade just yet given that the only advantage would be direct publishing to PDF and I have to do some post-publishing tweaks in my Word output so this isn't much good for me until Blaze comes out and fixes all my problems!

I agree, if PDF output is the only thing and one has the option to wait then upgrading to MSO 2007 is pointless. In fact, using any MSO is pointless. The default document format is a bad implementation of a disputed standard and the old format is still proprietary. Unless some special features are needed OpenOffice.org does the trick for a fraction of the cost and without the ribbon. And you can publish to PDF, but since Flare ignores everything other than MSO it will be a manual step. I must admit that I am not that thrilled with OOo's PDF output, so I hope that when MadCap's products publish directly to PDF that this will be less an issue.