Isn’t it amazing how a reasonably expensive product (office 2003) can become almost unusable in just 4 short years.

A customer purchased (without asking me for advice) a Vista PC. It came with the office 2007 trial, but since she already had office 2003 from her previous PC, I just removed the trial, and installed MSO2003.

Everything seemed OK on the surface, but after a while, some annoying incompatibilities started to surface:

• The outlook contacts list (imported from the old PC), started giving errors whenever it was accessed. Removing and re-importing the contact list seemed to fix it.
• Customer changed outlook, so that it would use MS word as her email editor (not something I would recommend, but it shouldn’t cause problems). So now, whenever she wants to reply, or create a new emails, Vista butts-in with: “A program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in outlook”. At this point, she has to click on the “yes I’m expecting this” button.
• Every time outlook is started, it asks for the email password (it forgets the password, even if you tick the “remember this password” box).
• Certain emails (I suspect html, or RTF emails… ie at least half), will not be formatted correctly, and the customer sees the raw html. No amount of web searching has found an answer to this issue (other than suggestions to upgrade to MSO2007).
• I try to backup the PST files (using the export function), and I get the a 30 second delay, followed by the message: The office assistant requires microsoft agent 2.0 or later. So I install MSAgent 2.0, and then the export starts giving another error: Export file: the messaging interface has returned an unknown error. if the problem persists, restart outlook.

If it wasn’t for the need to use Outlook, I’d have been tempted to just switch her over to OpenOffice.

Anyway, I go to download the Office 2007 trial, and I get a whole new set of problems (see one of my following posts).