Office 97 & Office XP - file associations

[User]

I've been searching for a couple of days for a solution to a problem
I'm having, but I haven't had much luck at this point. Hopefully
someone with similar experience can shed some light...

Due to the pain and complication of upgrading thousands of PC's in the
enterprise at once, we're still running Office 97. Occassionally,
however, we have analysts working with outside vendors, etc., who
provide documentation in the Office XP format. I've been able to
successfully install Office 97 and Office XP on the same machine, and
all appears to be well. The problem is that (and as I would expect)
all .doc, .xls, .ppt now open in XP. My big fear is that this one
person will go around opening files on the network, potentially
converting them to XP, and make them unavailable to everone else still
running 97.

The question then is this... is there any way, while both 97 and XP
are installed, to make the 97 apps the default (especially when
double-clicking on .doc and .xls files)? I guess I should also
mention I haven't had much luck manually updating the associated app
for those file types.

TIA for the help!
Tim

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Hi, Tim,

The file format (except for Access) is compatible across versions, so you
should have no need for both versions to be installed. Office 97 can read
Word, Excel and Powerpoint format from Office XP.