Office 2007 Can Suck It!!!

Fully compatible with Windows XP

Granted, with my institutional discount, it only cost 10 bucks, but after 9 months of trying to get the slow as molasses thing to work, I have given up, and reverted back to Office 2003, which I am pleased to report, is lightning quick.

Certainly, there were things to like about 07, particularly Word. I liked the flexibility of typing my blogposts in Word, and being able to post to this blog. I also like the multipanel compare and merge function, which made grading revisions much easier.

These wonderous features hardly justified the enormous amount of time and memory it took to save a file to a location not "My Documents", for examples. We are talking minutes here!

However, a note of caution: going back to Office 2003 is not a matter of slapping the disc back in, and voila! Oh no...see Office 2007, particularly if you use Outlook, changes a certain .dll so that, when you return to 2003 Outlook, with functionality, you will be greated with this message:

"Mapi32.dll is corrupt or the wrong version. Please reinstall Outlook."

Here's the cruelest part: Reinstalling Outlook doesn't fix the problem. Reinstalling Office doesn't fix the problem (unless, of course, you reinstall 07!). Hell, doing a repair reinstall of XP doesn't fix the problem.

Guess what else: The Official Microsoft help suggestion(s) DO NOT fix the problem, either.

You know what does fix the problem, which I discovered after literally 9 hours of going between safe mode and regular, logging on as the administrator, etc. This does:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033. Rename the MSMAPI32.DLL to MSMAPI32.OLD

This is, of course, typical for Microsoft (anyone remember Millenium?), a VERY BIG CORPORATION who will take something reliable, like 98SE and introduce Millenium,or XP, and replace it with Vista, all in the pathetic attempt to be all flashy and slick like Apple, except they invariably fuck it all up.

At any rate, here's to the end of the nightmare of Office 2007. Anybody know how to get the blog functionality in 2003?