Powerpoint 2007/2003 compatibility

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bob Surbiton
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Bob Surbiton

I have the basic 2003 suite, without Powerpoint. I want to buy Powerpoint
2007, which is available stand-alone from Amazon UK. If I run these
together, will they be compatible? For instance, will I be able to SEND an
Outline from Word 2003 and have it appear in Powerpoint 2007 and vice versa?
 
Bob Surbiton said:
I have the basic 2003 suite, without Powerpoint. I want to buy Powerpoint
2007, which is available stand-alone from Amazon UK. If I run these
together, will they be compatible? For instance, will I be able to SEND an
Outline from Word 2003 and have it appear in Powerpoint 2007 and vice versa?
Click to expand...

Unless you luck into someone who's installed this same combination and is
willing to supply answers to specific questions (like yours re the outline),
you may have to buy the standalone PPT and try it for yourself.

However, you should be able to save the outline from Word as RTF or plain ascii
text and open it in PPT to accomplish pretty much the same thing as sending
from Word directly.
 
Hi Bob

I have Office 2003 & 2007 installed (other than Outlook). If I use Word 2003
send to powerpoint it opens 2003, even if I have 2007 sitting open waiting
for it (yes, you can have 2003 & 2007 open at the same time). However, you
can use New slide -> slides from outline -> navigate to your word doc from
within 2007.

A few of things to note:
1. Double clicking a powrepoint file opens it in 2007 regardless of what it
was created in/file type so you have to use file -> open to open files in
2003.
2. I always work in the same version as my clients (I sometimes copy/paste
some of the nice new pretty stuff from 2007 to 2003) as this keeps things
simple. The way 2007 handles masters & colours schemes and all the rest is so
different... Others may have a different view on that but life's too short in
my opinion :-)
3. Charts - I've always used excel for my charts anyway so this hasn't been
an issue for me, but be aware that 2007 doesn't use ms graph at all - it uses
excel by default. I think there is a registry hack so you can force it to use
ms graph, but I don't do the registry thing and why would you when excel is
so much better? Oh wait a minute. It uses excel 2007, so it probably still
uses ms graph if you don't have excel 2007 installed - I would get into the
habit of using excel though, particularly if you are sharing the files with
people using 2007. Sorry, that was just a big long rambly confusing thing
wasn't it? Need coffee...

If you have any other questions don't hesitate to ask.

Lucy
 
I have the basic 2003 suite, without Powerpoint. I want to buy Powerpoint
2007, which is available stand-alone from Amazon UK.
Click to expand...

Steve and Lucy already gave you good technical advice. From the more
practical side:

- I assume that you are a private user, no enterprise, if you used 2003
Basic until now. Microsoft offers a Home & Student version of Office 2007
which will cost you half the price of a standalone PowerPoint. If you don't
earn your living with Office, this will be the cheapest solution.

- If you install the whole Office 2007 suite, you will be on the safe side
with compatibility. And more than that: If you define your own custom design
colors in PowerPoint, you can use them in Word and Excel, too.

- The user interface of Office 2003 and 2007 is so different. If you switch
between the versions constantly, you will always have to think where to find
a command. But the basic commands, like text formatting etc., are very
similar across the Office 2007 programs. Which makes working with one
version only more fluently.

Best regards,
Ute
 
Thanks all three of you. Lucy, since I will not have PPT 2003 to be open, it
will be interesting to see if in that case information from Word will go
straight to PPT 2007 as the only PPT open. Otherwise, I will use Steve's
alternative. First of all, though - explore what Ute says about costs. When
I looked at Amazon UK PPT 2007 standalone was 75pds and the Home Office Sutie
2007 was quite a lot more.
 
3. Charts - I've always used excel for my charts anyway so this hasn't been
an issue for me, but be aware that 2007 doesn't use ms graph at all - it uses
excel by default. I think there is a registry hack so you can force it to use
ms graph, but I don't do the registry thing and why would you when excel is
so much better? Oh wait a minute. It uses excel 2007, so it probably still
uses ms graph if you don't have excel 2007 installed - I would get into the
habit of using excel though, particularly if you are sharing the files with
people using 2007. Sorry, that was just a big long rambly confusing thing
wasn't it? Need coffee...
Click to expand...

FWIW:

When you install 2007 and do a custom install (the only sane thing to do), you
have the option of installing MSGraph. It's not installed by default.

If you choose that option, when you open an older PPT file and activate an
MSGraph chart, PPT asks you if you want to convert or edit as-is.

If you choose not to convert, the chart stays an MSGraph object, and should
continue to function normally when you return the file to clients and they open
it back up in 2003 and prior.

No reghax required to get that degree of compatibility.
 
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