Install MS Office 2007 using Windows XP Pro?

[robert213]

My GF's Dell D620 is running Intel Core Duo 1.83 GHz T2400 processor with 1 GB of RAM.

She wants to use the new enhanced features (voice over presentation) in Powerpoint. She is planning to uninstall MS Office 2003 and install MS Office 2007.

How well does MS Office 2007 run using Windows XP Pro?

[GomJabbar]

Seems to work fine on my wife's T42 with XP. Don't know anything about voice over presentation though. I don't think she has tried to use that feature. AFAIK, the only Office programs my wife uses are Word and Powerpoint (for school).

[robert213]

Don't know anything about voice over presentation though.

Instead of installing MS Office 2007, I installed Adobe Presenter 6.2. It is an add-on program for MS Office's Powerpoint.

I have no idea whether this feature is built into MS Office 2007 or not.

[mattbiernat]

as long as she is okay with Office 2007 being slow. I have installed 2007 on my X300 and i got nothing but lagging (and I have 4GB of ram). I have installed Office XP and everything is lightning fast.

[laracroft]

Hi Robert,
This is Lara Croft, I read your comments and I am giving you answer to your question.
MS Office 2007 is fully compatible with Windows XP Pro.
Right now I used it on my computer system in Windows XP Pro and I don't found any problem in it.

[pianowizard]

I have installed 2007 on my X300 and i got nothing but lagging (and I have 4GB of ram).

Did you install Service Pack 2? It makes Office 2007 run faster.

[mattbiernat]

NO, i was using vista. Now i have moved on to 7 but I really did not like the menu organization in office 2007. Hopefully in office 10 they will come back to the classic menus, then i might buy it.

[pianowizard]

NO, i was using vista.

I was referring to SP2 for Office 2007, not SP2 for the operating system.

[RealBlackStuff]

IMHO Office 2003 was the last really useful version of Office.
Tried and thrashed 2007 within minutes after installation.

[mpcook]

IMHO Office 2003 was the last really useful version of Office.
Tried and thrashed 2007 within minutes after installation.

I agree, I had Office 2007 running on a T43 under XP, and it did run fine (although it seemed slow) but 2003 is way better - faster and easier to use. So I downgraded back to 2003 with no problem.

Mike

[dr_st]

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to Office 2007 on my corporate laptop, running XP Pro.

Works just fine, no glitches. Reasonable speed. The new interface definitely takes some getting used to.

What forced me to do it was that I needed the ability to convert Word documents to PDF, in a way that automatically converts headings to PDF bookmarks. Surprisingly, I could not find a single free PDF converted that does that, but Word's built-in Save to PDF does.

The Power Point has some new features as well that make it better than Power Point 2003. It gives you more flexibility creating and modifying placeholders in your slides, and has a nice presenter mode where you can browse the slides, while the presentation is shown fullscreen on a different monitor.

[mattbiernat]

when i fast scroll in powepoint 2007 i get glitches and slows but when i fast scroll in XP everything is smooth. i will never use 2007 for that reason.

[pianowizard]

i will never use 2007 for that reason.

Again, the SP2 for Office 2007 might have solved that problem. When I started using Office 2007 almost two years ago, I hated it for the exact same reasons you cited: unfamiliar menu organization and slow. So I continued to use mainly Office 2003 for several months. But then SP1 came out and installing it made Office 2007 significantly faster, and eventually I also adapted to the menus. Now I will never go back to Office 2003. I use Office 2007 even on my 9-year-old Thinkpad 240Z, which has 500MHz Pentium III and only 256MB of RAM!

[mattbiernat]

hmmm maybe one day i will try it again. but for sure not on the x300. my other problem with 2007 was that the menus are very wide and they further decrese already smaller 16:10 aspect ratio. My T60p with 4:3 probably will feel better. thanks for the tip pianowizzard.

[mattbiernat]

ok i have installed both office XP and 2007 on my X300. I am currently running Windows 7 and office 2007 still does not scroll down as fast as office XP. And i do the fast scrolling down a lot as I look at a lot of radiographs and need to get from picture A on slide 1 to picture B on slide 25 really fast.

[RealBlackStuff]

Instead of Word itself, try using the Word Viewer program. Free download in different (XP/2000/2003/2007) flavors.
Should be a lot faster without the bloat.

[Marin85]

I have been having Office 2007 from the very beginning with this ThinkPad, including the times when it was running Windows XP. Office 2007 has never been slow under XP for me until all the glorified patches and dubious service packs from M$ came... However, Office 2003 seems to be faster than Office 2007 under XP, most likely because of the slightly bloated GUI of Office 2007. But in Vista and Windows 7 nothing can beat Office 2007. It is very sad though that the great deal of updates for Office 2007 had their performance impact on the original product. It always seems to me like M$ is trading off performance for security and stability (I guess I just discovered the wheel)... At least, SP2 tries to deal with that and appears to recover some of that lost performance. Office 2010, anyone?

Just my 0.02$