Will my Microsoft Office 2003 work with Vista or do I need to go out and buy it again?

Question

I am looking to buy a new computer and they all come with Vista now. Do I need to go out and buy Microsoft Office again or will it be compatible? I really don't want to have to spend another $149 on top of the price of the computer! Thanks!

Answer 1

It will work. If your vista computer came with a trial version of Office 2007. uninstall the office 2007 activation wizard and the 2007 trial first For some reason it messes up the installation of any office except 2007.( they might have done it on purpose) I thought it was just me but alot of people are having that problem

Answer 2

MS Office 2003 will work with MS Vista. I've installed it and haven't run into any compatibility issues. As for supporting the new MS Office 2007 formats, keep in mind that an alternative non-proprietary document format called Open Document Format (ODF) is being considered by many government agencies (US and international). Please don't confuse this with MS Open Office XML, which Microsoft would like to push in place of ODF.

Microsoft 2007, OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org), StarOffice (http://sun.com/staroffice), and other applications will support ODF. For more information on the ODF, please review the Wikipedia link below.

** Edit **
I also had to uninstall the trial version of MS Office 2007 (as the poster above me indicated). I did this before attempting to install MS Office 2003 so I hadn't received any error messages.

Answer 3

Office 2003 will work on Vista. However, for Office 2003 to be able to work with the new file formats used for Office 2007 (such as .docx), you'll also need to install the Office compatibility Pack. Info below:

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats

Brief Description
Open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.

For those that have older Office products installed, the Compatibility Pack is located at the following site:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101686761033.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en

Note: If you use Microsoft Word 2000 or Microsoft Word 2002 to read or write documents containing complex scripts, please see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925451 for information to enable Word 2007 documents to be displayed correctly in your version of Word.

Note#2: You can also download the newest Powerpoint Viewer for 2007
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=048DC840-14E1-467D-8DCA-19D2A8FD7485&displaylang=en