Office 2007 converter pack errors

[Warren]

I'm currently running Office 2007 Enterprise edition on a test PC, and
loading/saving files to the new formats work fine.

However, on my Windows XP machine with Office XP and all the latest service
packs, I've installed the Office 2007 converter pack, and whilst Excel and
PowerPoint open/save in 2007 format without any problems, I keep getting this
rather annoying error in Word XP:

"This is a pre-release version of the compatibility pack and can open
pre-release Office 2007 files only. Do you want to check for a newer version
of the Compatibility Pack?"

Clicking Yes goes to the download page to download the very same
compatibility pack that's already been installed.

Is there any way I can get the compatibility pack to properly recognise Word
2007 files and open them without this error message?

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi Warren,

The error message often indicates a file that was created in an earlier (pre-release) version of Office 2007 or a document that
started in an older version and was saved in the newer version.

What formats are you saving the Word 2007 documents in? The converter pack supports document (.docx and .docm) but not template
(.dotx and .dotm) formats.

===============
I'm currently running Office 2007 Enterprise edition on a test PC, and
loading/saving files to the new formats work fine.

However, on my Windows XP machine with Office XP and all the latest service
packs, I've installed the Office 2007 converter pack, and whilst Excel and
PowerPoint open/save in 2007 format without any problems, I keep getting this
rather annoying error in Word XP:

"This is a pre-release version of the compatibility pack and can open
pre-release Office 2007 files only. Do you want to check for a newer version
of the Compatibility Pack?"

Clicking Yes goes to the download page to download the very same
compatibility pack that's already been installed.

Is there any way I can get the compatibility pack to properly recognise Word
2007 files and open them without this error message? >>
--

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*

 

[Warren]

Bob,

All the Word documents have been saved in the _official_ release of Word
2007 (Enterprise Edition, release 12.0.4518.1014) in .docx format. The
converter pack version is exactly the same as well.

Also, if I try to save a Word document in Office XP as Word 2007 .docx
format, it throws another error "there was an error opening the file".

This clearly indicates to me that despite me using the correct version of
the converter, and despite it working perfectly in PowerPoint and Excel, it
just fails in Word for some reason.

Maybe the converter pack is getting confused with the beta and final
versions of Word and just throws anything out? In any case, it's rather
annoying.

 

[DavidD]

I am having the same problem with Office 2003, but perhaps I can add some
more info. Because it is working on some machines and not on others. I have
the identical Office 2003 and Compatibility Pack versions installled on
identical hardware, but with slightly different mixes of other software. On
my student workstations, the converter appears to work fine. But I am
building a new software image for my employee machines and the file converter
gives the "this is a pre-release version..." message, when opening the
identical file.

In fact, when I went back to an earlier version of my employee image and
installed all Office and Windows updates, and the Compatibility Pack, it
worked at first. then I installed several other unrelated software packages,
and updated my antivirus client, and then the convert error message started
appearing again.

I'm going back through the process again and will post if I isolate what is
breaking the file converter. In the meantime, this is time-consuming, and if
anyone has already found the solution, that would be great!

 

[DavidD]

I found what is causing me to get the message "this is a pre-release version
of the Office 2007 compatibility pack" when opening final release Word 2007
files with final release Compatibility Pack in Office 2003!

But don't get too excited, it is a very site-specific solution.

Turns out we had an old version of Texas Instruments' TI Interactive
(version 1.3) installed on the image I was working from. To clean up the
image, I uninstalled TI Interactive *after* I installed the Office 2007
Compatibility Pack. That was when the file converter stopped working and I
started getting the "pre-release version..." error message. To make the file
converter work again, all I have to do is reinstall TI Interactive 1.3. I
don't even have to reboot. Just uninstall TI Interactve - the converter
breaks. Reinstall TI Interactive - the converter works again.

Like I said, this is pretty specific to our site. Maybe this could be
because of an Office DLL that TI-Interactive removes when you uninstall it?
Maybe other people who are having this problem could check for similar
interactions (no pun intended) with other software.

An any rate, I can get the Compatibility Pack working again, even if I have
to leave some old piece of software on our machines. First, I'm going to try
uninstalling TI Interactive *before* I install the compatibility pack. I
won't bother posting on that, unless someone is really curious.