Office 2003 and 2010 on the same machine?

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
7,882
when both are installed is it possible to force all docs by default to open in 2003 versions? File assocations are all set to 2003 versions but it opens in 2010. Thking maybe assoc pointing to batch file might trick it?
 
Try this:

1. Open MS Excel 2003 from the start menu.
2. Go to Help > Detect and Repair
3. Start the repair and wait approx 5-10 mins.

When double clicking on .XLS / .DOC files within Windows, they should now open with Office 2003, instead of Office 2010.

However if you open something in Office 2010 again, it may become the new default.

Hope this helps!
 
You can definitely do this for Word and Excel if you want all documents to open by default in 2003 - but what you can't easily do is have 2003 documents open in 2003 and 2010 documents open in 2010... as far as I know.

You need to add a registry entry to stop the 2010 applications re-registering themselves as default every time you run them.
Look for HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office within should be a folder for Office 2003 and 2010 (I think this is 14.0).
So go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Excel\Options and add a DWORD called NoReReg and set the value to 1. You can then do the same for Word. You may be able to do the same for other office programs but I've not tried, but from what I understand you can't have two versions of Outlook and not easily run two versions of Access.

Once you've done the above run the detect and repair tool in the 2003 setup to re-register the 2003 programs as default and you should be done.

It still won't be perfect, for instance if your working in Word 2010 and go to open a file through explorer it'll open in the currently running version of 2010 - I believe this is to do with the fact that they use the single application name WINWORD.exe regardless of versions, and as a version is already running it just opens the file in that. But with the exception of this case it will always open in 2003.

Hope that's some help! :)
 
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