ItsGeekToMe.co

The official home of It's Geek to Me on the web!

Issue #413: June 21–27, 2015

I love technology.  Here I am, sitting in an RV in the middle of practically nowhere, working at a battery-powered laptop writing an issue of It’s Geek To Me.  And if that’s not Geeky enough for you, I discovered that if I put my iPhone up in a certain window, I can catch just a fringe of a 4G cellular signal.  It’s enough that I can activate my phone’s “Personal Hotspot” feature, and enjoy full Internet access, albeit a little slow.  So here we are “roughing it” with two iPhones, two iPads, and a full-sized business-class laptop, upon which I am typing this.  Spouse Peripheral and I had Facetime with Daughterboard and the grandkids last night, and are keeping up on e-mail and the news.  Isn’t technology great?  My answer is yes, when properly applied.  So, since I have full e-mail access, let’s find a question for this week, shall we?

 

• • •

 

Q:  I am using Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010, Military Appreciation Edition (It does not include Outlook).  I also own an upgrade edition of Office 2007 Standard that DOES include Outlook.  I’m looking for a way I can continue to use Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010, Military Appreciation Edition and use MS Outlook from other versions I own.

– Bill W.
Navarre, Florida

 

A:  I think it’s important to point out from the beginning that Microsoft Office and its aggregate applications – including Outlook – are all commercial software.  Yes, I know they are often available as a free download, and are even included with many new PCs, but those are trial versions that stop working after 30 to 90 days unless you pay for them.  Yes, Microsoft actually expects to get paid for the end results of them employing countless engineers at a high salary, and having them spend tens of thousands of hours designing, coding, and debugging their software (we’ll not debate the efficacy of that last part right now).  The point is, I want to make sure that nobody thinks that Bill W. is asking me to help him pirate the software  or get around the End-User License Agreement.  Bill owns licenses to multiple versions of Office, and is simply asking how to use the Outlook from an older version, while using all of the other applications from the newer version.  Nothing underhanded going on here.

The good news for you, Bill, is that you can have multiple versions of Office loaded simultaneously, and you SHOULD be able to run any version of any application that you like.  The trick is the installation order.  You should always install the older versions first, and then go forward.  In your case, you must do this anyway, since your Office 2007 that includes Outlook is an upgrade to a previous version.  That prior version must be present before you can install 2007.  When you install a newer version, it should not de-install or overwrite any of the existing versions.  Rather, they should install side-by-side, in a differently-named directory, leaving all the previous versions intact.  What will change is which programs are associated with the various MS Office file extensions.  For example, files of type .docx which were formerly associated with Word.exe in the 2007 version will be associated with Word in  a newer version when it’s installed.  That doesn’t mean you can’t run the old version – it just means that if you double-click a file, Windows will automatically open the newer version and load the file into it.  To run an older version, just find the appropriate .exe file and double-click it.  If there are no longer shortcuts to it on your Start menu, you can even create those.

Assuming your versions were installed in the order I described above, your system should be all ready to go, Bill.  Use Windows Explorer to search the C: drive for a file named Outlook.exe.  There should only be one, and it should be in the folder with the 2007 version.  If there are more than one, use the directory paths where they are located to determine which version of Office each one belongs to.  Again, feel free to set up a shortcut to the appropriate file for your convenience.  Don’t try to move it, or you’ll wind up having to re-install everything.


Leave a Reply

March 2024
S M T W T F S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  

Search the site

Archives

Copyright Notice

All content on this site is Copyright © 2007-2024 by Jeff Werner – All rights reserved.