I recently purchased a new Dell with a Vista system. It also came pre loaded with Office 2007. My problem is: I do contracting work at home and Office 2007 is not compatible with the software they use so I must install Office 2003 to continue to work. If I go to the add/remove programs in my control panel should I just uninstall the Office 2007 program icon or will I need to uninstall all the individual programs associated with it? I've heard of people having issues uninstalling 2007 and going back to an earlier version and I want to make sure I do this correctly so I don't mess up my computer. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Office 2007 IS compatible with Office 2003. You don't have to uninstall it.

Microsoft released an Office 2007 Compatibility Pack for Office 2003 that lets it open documents created in 2007. Everyone can install that for free. Send everyone this link, they should install this no matter what since people are creating 2007 docs all the time and you want to be able to read them.

Office 2007 Compatibility Pack for Office 2003

Now, for you, you can just save your documents in older 2003 formats. Here's a page link that shows you how to make your Office 2007 always save in 2003 format by default.

Make Word 2007 Always Save in Word 2003 Format :: the How-To Geek

Well, I know I risk your rating wrath (my post above included info that isn't wrong and if you followed the second half of my post, you wouldn't have to do ANY of this, but whatever... )

.. anyway, just uninstall the program. It will do the work. These are grownup programs, you can just install 2003 when 2007 in uninstalled.


... or just set your 2007 into 2003 mode like I suggested. A lot less work.