Office 2000 and XP on the same machine

[Frank]

I work as a system admin at a university, and my
department is currently riding my case about having both
office 2000 and xp installed on the lab machines this
coming semester. I know this is dumb and unnecessary, and
I'm sure it comes down to one of the faculty here whining
about how they don't want to learn xp. My question is, is
it possible to do this (since it's the solution that will
hopefully cause me the least grief), or is this completely
insane and I'll regret even thinking about it? Thanks.

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Hi, Frank,

It's possible, though Microsoft doesn't recommend it:

290576 - OFFXP: Running Multiple Versions of Microsoft Office:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290576

Word will configure itself if you go back and forth, and you can only have
one version of Outlook. You may also introduce some document corruption if
you go back and forth between versions a number of times (even though the
file format is fundamentally backward compatible).

Hope that helps.

 

[Wolf]

There isn't much difference between them. If you could do it in 2000, it's
almost certain that you can do it in XP.

I would suggest that you don't run them both, as you could cause problems,
if you try to update the 2000.

I have had no problem switching over to XP from 2000. One of my users
didn't like FrontPage XP, so I uninstalled frontpage XP, and installed
frontpage 2000. So far (It's been over a month), there hasn't been any
problems.

Office XP files are almost certain to run on 2000, so you could let the
people that don't want to upgrade stay at 2000, and let them see others
using xp, and see how easy it is to change.

Wolf