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General discussion

Office 2003 and 2004 Compatibility

Jul 7, 2004 8:55AM PDT

I have a friend who has a PC desktop with Office 2003 and a Mac iBook with Office 2004. Just recently, they created a PowerPoint presentation using Office 2003, they stuck it on a Flash drive, and needed to make some last minute changes using Office 2004.

Office 2004 has no problem opening the file, and everything seems fine until they try and open the file again in Office 2003. The file will open flawlessly any number of times with Office 2004, but every time Office 2003 tries to open it it says that part of the file is missing. The exact error message is: PowerPoint cannot open <filename> because part of the file is missing.

We've both tried looking through the MSKB for anything, came up empty. Creating a new copy of the file doesn't seem to help. It doesn't matter if you try to open the file from the Flash drive, or the copy stored on the iBook's HDD via a LAN, the same error pops up.

For now, OpenOffice managed to open the file and "convert" it to Office format, but that is just flat out rediculous to have to do that. Has anyone ever run into this problem and managed to fix it?

Discussion is locked

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Sorry, call Mother.
Jul 7, 2004 9:07AM PDT

But at least you can put Open Office on the Mac as well as the PC and it's less strain and dollars.

Bob

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Re: Sorry, call Mother.
Jul 7, 2004 9:12AM PDT

Actually, I just found the solution. The MSKB search didn't come up with anything, but Google did come up with a few interesting hits. This one in particular:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=828041&product=ppt2003

I went to Office Update, let it do it's thing, and all is well with the world again. I still don't get how it is they managed to let something like this slip into the shipping product though. You would think it'd be something that pops up pretty early in product testing. Oh well, problem solved for now.

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Good to see if fixed.
Jul 7, 2004 9:26AM PDT

The lower cost of Open Office has made it spread like a worm at the office (home and lab.) So I don't get to deal with such as much as I used to...

What I find annoying is that a NEW OFFICE 2003 package you pick up will likely need this patch even though it's been out for over 6 months...

Bob