Can I run Word 2003 with Office 2007?

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The deletion of the blue background/white text option in Word 2007 is sending
me back to Word 2003. Can I uninstall Word 2007 and re-install Word 2003
while retaining the rest of Office 2007? And if so, can you tell me how?

Many thanks for whatever suggestions anyone may have,

DCH
 
You REALLY should MOVE on - the same way research does!

Regardless you can run both versions 2003/2007 - you can make 2003 the
default Word program to open also.
 
Regarding "You REALLY should MOVE on..." This is the second such reply I've
received (the first to a similar question). Let me just say that not every
one enjoys the healthy eyesight you obviously enjoy.
 
There is a way to get white text on a blue background in Word 2007 by using
the following recipe:

1. In the Page Backround group of the Page Layout tab, click Page Color and
select a shade of blue - this is the blue background.

2. Type a line of text and then place the insertion point inside a word of
text.

3. Right click on the selected text and choose Font from the menu.

4. On the Font dialog box select white in the Font Color drop down list box.
The word containing the insertion point will turn white.

5. Without moving the insertion point, right click again and choose Styles
from the context menu. This displays a submenu.

6. From the submenu choose Save Selection As A New Quick Style. This
displays the Create New Style From Formatting dialog box.

7. In the Create New Style From Formatting dialog box, enter the name of the
Style. If you used say, the "Heading 1" style for the text, then you might
want to call it "White Font Heading 1".

You can alter steps 6 and 7 to change the existing style to have white font
- choose Update Heading 1 To Match Selection in step 6.

You can see there is a bit of tedium initially: for every style of font you
use, at the beginning you will need to create a white font version of it or
change it to use white font. However, most documents aren't likely to use a
huge number of styles and over time you'll have a big collection which you
can store in your normal template file. In fact, a good start might be to
edit the normal template file and simply change all the styles to use white
font.

Perhaps some other folks here can suggest ways to reduce the initial tedium
by utilizing themes or some other technique.

Some time ago, I believe Word took it's cue from the setting of the system
colors for window and window text. Whether that's true now in 2007 with
themes I don't know. One of the major goals behind the implementation of
system color and font settings was to help people with less than optimal
vision to use Windows. This would be worth exploring if the above approach is
unsuitable or excessively tedious.

E McElroy
 
It occurred to me that one way to reduce the tedium to almost nothing is to
code a macro which will enumerate the document styles, obtain the Font object
from each, and set the font color to white. That would mean a very simple
document creation process consisting of selecting a template, changing the
background color on the Page Layout tab to blue, and running the macro to
change the fonts to white.

This may have an effect on the use of themes but given the very specific
color combination which you want, you may not care.

As a long-time C/C++/C# person (too long!) I don't do VBA but it might be an
interesting little project that shouldn't take a VBA person too long. Perhaps
one of the forum's heavyweights can code one up for you - Beth, Graham, Herb,
and others...any volunteers?

E McElroy
 
Thank you thank you for taking the time to explain all this, McElroy. Some
of it is over my head but I have worked out a partial (though not very
elegant) solution: I put the "Page Background" icon on the Quick Access
Toolbar. Creating a new document, I click on the Page Background icon and
choose dark blue and the text automatically comes up white. Perfect. It
requires three clicks to get a new blue-background/white text page for every
new document but I can live with that. The major problem is that "found"
text (text found by the "Find and Replace" function) is highlighted in either
dark gray or black, which is almost impossible to find against the dark blue
background. If "found" text were highlighted in almost any other color, such
that I could see it against the blue background, I would be a happy man
("over the moon" as my daughter says). Is it possible to change the color of
"found" text? Thank you again for your time and help McElroy.

DCH
 
Have you tried printing a document with these formatting suggestions?


--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
 
It sounds like you're very close to what you want except for the highlighting
problem. I had a chance to look at the possible solution of changing system
colors which I mentioned in a previous note. Restating the current difficulty
is probably a good way to start:

Problem:
======
When the page background is blue, the gray selection or highlight rectangle
is difficult to see.


Changing the System Colors (XP Pro OS):
===========================
The system colors are settable to reflect individual preferences and to help
people with vision difficulties; at least that was the intent. I set two
system colors using the Control Panel which allows changes to a subset of the
settable colors: windows and window text were set to blue and white,
respectively. Word 2007 does pay attention to the system colors: default page
backgrounds were now a deep blue and the default font was white. However, the
default color of other style fonts was not white: on my machine, the Heading
1 font was red. So, while Word is making some adjustments to reflect the
system colors, the result may not be what you want without further changes to
font colors. Additionally, there was no effect on the selection problem:
selections were still highlighted by putting the selection inside a gray box
which is not easy to see on a blue page.

Changing the system colors had other side effects, including some very
interesting ones: looking at Outlook and Internet Explorer, it's obvious that
some programmers were checking the system colors and others were not. The
Dates Received column, for instance, is pure white in Outlook while the
lettering in other areas remains black. Internet Explorer did the right thing
in some ways: a successful find encloses the located word in a white
selection box which stands out nicely on a blue field but other areas were
improperly colored. I could go on but it's clear that current software
offerings from MS are not being sufficiently tested to see if they gracefully
handle changes in the system colors so this may not be a good solution for
you overall.

Programming:
=========
I did a quick look around at some of the Word objects and didn't see any
obvious way to tell Word how to display a selected or highlighted area. The
problem is not a simple one in the general case since color backgrounds can
vary quite a bit in different sections of a document. In your case, however,
the background and the font colors seem to be constant so a programming
solution might be possible if Word or Office doesn't provide a simpler way.
I'll take a further look to get a better handle on the problem and will get
back to you.

Ed McElroy
 
When I do a print preview, I get a white sheet which indicates that the white
font is being preserved but not the blue background. Since I do mostly
programming, I don't have a color printer so I was uncertain whether this was
a limitation caused by my printer. Since you brought this up, however, I
would guess that you must be seeing a similar result on your print preview.

Well, it's easy enough to check for someone with a color printer but whether
the blue background is preserved or not, my guess is that it's more
economical to purchase blue paper than to color white sheets blue with a
printer.

E McElroy
 
You know, this attitude really amazes me. I, as a user of software
applications specifically and a consumer in general, get really annoyed when
other people think they know better what I want than I do. In addition to
being a consumer I have been a software developer for over 20 years and one
rule I have always tried to follow is: Give people what they want. If you
don't, they will go elsewhere. Another one is this: don't ever take
function away once it is there.

As for your "move on" comment. I have applications that are 15 years old
that I still use. Why? because they were done well, they work, and they
help me do my job. In short, they are useful to me and to be selfish that's
all that matters. If this white on blue configuration is useful and
desireable for DCH then that is all that matters.

There's one more saying we like here in New England: "If it ain't broke,
don't fix it."
Apologies to my 5th. grade grammar teacher :-)
 
If you use blue paper, you will still get an apparently blank page. Word can
print "white" text only by knocking it out of a colored background (unless
you have a printer in which you can substitute a white cartridge for the
black one and use "Auto" font color).

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
Although Microsoft does generally have a commitment to keeping older
features for compatibility with older versions (and the reasons for this
were explained to us MVPs whenever we suggested removing the troublesome WP
options), Word 2007 was designed "from the ground up," and a lot of the
decisions were based on "popularity" or "majority rule." Apparently surveys
showed that such a very tiny population actually used "Blue background,
white text" that a relatively small percentage would miss it. Of course,
even 0.1% of Word users is still thousands of users.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
That's interesting, something I would never know with my non-color printer.
Of course, it may be that the blue background is intended only for display
purposes and is not the intended color of a printout. If it is intended for a
printout, in addition to the clever work-around you proposed, changing the
font colors to a bright yellow prior to printing and then back again to white
afterwards might be a reasonable substitute (yellow on blue was a favorite
back in the DOS era).

A macro would seem to be required to accomplish the font color changes
quickly. No one appears to be volunteering to write one in VBA although it
looks pretty straightforward to do so. If there no volunteers in another few
days, I will check out a VBA book and code one up (after coding it in C# or
C++ to make sure it works!).

E McElroy
 
As unpaid (I assume) evangelists for Word, I'm sure Microsoft's Marketing
department would insist that MVPs be kept informed on major changes such as
this. It is certainly possible that the feature was dropped as a result of a
survey but, unless they specifically said that, it's also quite possible it
was a feature they didn't have time to add or it could have been simply an
oversight. This was, after all, a major change, and in major changes, some
things drop through the cracks. (.NET V1.0 had some famous early gaffes where
important functionality was simply forgotten but, in fairness, .NET V1.0 was
a project of enormous proportions, far greater, I'm sure, than a rewrite of
Word.)

All of which is to say, perhaps you can relay to Microsoft that the feature
is missed and maybe it will return in the next minor release for those who
need or want it.

E McElroy
 
OOPS!

This was intended to be a response to Ms Barnhill's reply to W J Wyatt and
got misposted in this position by mistake. Sorry.

E McElroy
 
We are unpaid, but you will start a war if you call us evangelists. And
marketing has nothing to do with it; we talk to the developers of the
product and have some input into the product design. I can tell you that the
reason this feature was dropped was "lack of use." I don't know that I heard
this directly viva voce from the product group, though; I would have thought
it was in Jensen Harris's Office UI blog, but a search doesn't turn it up
there.

I did find
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Offic...213f-47d5-809c-aba9331ae0331033.mspx?mfr=true,
which says that AutoSummarize was "a low-use feature." About BBWT, it just
says, "This feature, included in previous versions of Word to emulate legacy
versions of WordPerfect, is no longer used." Maybe they just got tired of
accommodating WP migrants?

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
Well I certainly don't want to start a war since I don't run as fast as I
used to. I do suspect, however, that Microsoft's Marketing department almost
certainly regards MVPs as evangelists and may well run more interference for
you in the corporate bureaucracy than you might be aware of. Who, for
instance, initially came up with the MVP concept? Microsoft's programmers?
I'm skeptical but I'm willing to be persuaded. There's nothing wrong with
Marketing department support. After all, you're very valuable to Microsoft
and their Marketing people are surely aware of that. I wonder, for instance,
how often Office MVPs recommend OpenOffice to their clients; and you do a
great job providing support for the products in these forums - you're all
saving Mr. Gates the salaries of a lot of support people he would otherwise
have to hire.

I appreciate the information and the insight. In past versions, this feature
might have been easier to implement than it is in the current version because
of themes and other features. I noticed when I changed the system colors that
themes were still going their own way. Perhaps the additional amount of work
required was not justified although people with vision problems such as DCH
appear to have been short-changed in the process.

E McElroy
 
E said:
Well I certainly don't want to start a war since I don't run as fast
as I used to. I do suspect, however, that Microsoft's Marketing
department almost certainly regards MVPs as evangelists and may well
run more interference for you in the corporate bureaucracy than you
might be aware of. Who, for instance, initially came up with the MVP
concept? Microsoft's programmers? I'm skeptical but I'm willing to be
persuaded.
Click to expand...

Ding! Ding! Ding!

The MVP program originated in the Developer Division. It resides in Customer
Service and Support these days.

Dan
 
I'm truly amazed! Tell me at least that the idea came out of the office of an
Engineering Vice President who spends a lot of time in meetings with
Marketing and I'll buy you a lobster lunch the next time you're in the Boston
area.

E McElroy
 
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