Posted under 64 Bit
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Tags Gotcha, MSOffice, MSWord, Tip, Windows64bit, Windows7
According to Microsoft here you can do this if you install them in increasing order, i.e. you must install the earliest first.
In my case, Office 2000 would not play ball at all, as Word 2000 froze on startup.
Office XP ran ok, and does seem to coexist with Office 2007, but there are some issues.
I had to mess around with compatibility mode for XP, but ended up taking it off as it appeared to try to run Word XP in administrator mode even though this was not enabled – strange. I ended up not needing it and Word XP started OK but was initially a bit flakey as said.
Two issues remain outstanding, but they are possible to live with:-
1/ Double clicking a .doc document always opens Word 2007, even if you try to change the file association. I had it working correctly for a little while (loading up Word XP for .docs and Word 2007 for .docx, but Word 2007 ended up taking over. This may have had something to do with the next point – ‘re-registering’
2/ Both versions wanted to reconfigure themselves each time you switched from running one version to the other one. Even on a fast PC this takes 10-20 seconds of thrashing with a conifiguration dialog displayed – not nice, although Microsoft say that this is normal behaviour if you have multiple versions (Word XP did its configuration a lot quicker). This post describes the way around this by telling both versions of Word not to ‘rereg’ themselves, by setting the following registry keys :-
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options\NoReReg = 1 (DWord) – for Word 2007
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Word\Options\NoReReg = 1 (DWord) – for Word XP
This fixed the problem, although it is not entirely recommended as it may cause issues during fixes/updates that may need the ReReg to be run. I would imagine that removing the keys temporarily and re-adding them would solve this.
If I was in this situation again, I would certainly try to avoid installing multiple versions on the same OS – it is clearly not supported well. It would be best to use another machine or a VM.