Upgrading W97 to WXP (97—>>>XP (Yikes))

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My organisation has finally decided to upgrade the current mix of w97/w98/w2000 and similar variations of Office to XP. Will happen in a couple of months. The good news is they probably will give me a new laptop since the crank on the side of my current one doesn’t generate the desired Mhz. I am using W97/Office 97 except for Outlook 98.

The actual upgrading will be done by our IT experts, but as a user I am a little concerned that I may Xpect Problems if I don’t take some precautionary steps. I’ve tried some searches of this forum and of the lounge and got lots and lots of hits, but I haven’t seen any that address what steps I can take to minimise upgrading problems. Things like contacts lists in Outlook, which I have heard change dramatically (for the better).

Can someone out there point me in the right direction, or should I just sit back and trust my IT department who says, “you won’t even notice the change”.

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I have just gone from Windows 95 to a brand new machine with Windows XP and have found it to be relatively pain free although I wasn’t too keen on the colourful cartoonish look of the new start menu, control panel etc although it is easy to change to what they call “classic view” which looks more like you’ll be used to.

I used Office 2000 on both OS’s. I backed up all of my Word and Excel templates and they all transferred fine. In Outlook I had no problems exporting and importing Contacts etc but was cross with myself as I didn’t “map fields” for Calender items ans so have ended up not knowing what I am doing after 1st September.

The other thing that I was slightly put out by were the default “file associations” – all my jpegs and gifs automatically opened in some new thing called Windows Picture & Fax Viewer but that was easily rectified.

Hardware was a problem with items over 2 years old – my old scanner manufacturer is now defunct so new new drivers were available and my Compact Flash card reader was just too old so that had to be replaced. Good old Epson had XP drivers for my 2 year old printer which were easy to download and install and keyboards and mice were recognised with no prompting.

On the whole and after about 1 month and I happy with XP

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Hi Sue, I work on 3 different machines with 3 different O/S, today as it happened I had been on XP Home for several hours during which I too discovered the Windows Picture & Fax Viewer and found it annoying. I have not had the time to go back to it yet, were you able to track down the file associations and alter them, or is it different in XP?

In relation to the original question, so far the time I have spent on the XP machine has been pretty easy, but I do back up my address book and email often, plus other essentials and have found no troubles opening 97 documents, or various graphics created in 97, 2000 and multiple graphics programs that I use. Fingers crossed!

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I was working when it was bugging me so I got round it by opening the files from within the application that I wanted to use. However it appears to be fairly similar – open My Computer – navigate to a jpeg, gif whatever and right click open with then browse to Fireworks, Photoshop etc and check the “Always open files of this type with this program” Box

What I find annoying is that I can’t imagine why anyone would want to open say a .png with the viewer but I suppose it is an improvement on some of Microsofts previous image/graphics attempts!

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Thanks for the reply Sue and MarkD. I have always altered when necessary from the file association, which is the same in XP as it turns out, but I agree with MarkD in that it is a pain in the backside to go through the list of graphics and picture file types etc one by one. Guess MS don’t want to make our lives easier. The only thing of any value I found in the “XP view page fax” thingie, was it will increase the size of a small video window without stuffing up the view. Cannot see any other purpose at all for it. Maybe I am missing something?

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So far I’ve found ONE (and only one) good use for the WIN XP Pix & Fax Viewer. If u. have a lot of animated .GIF files (as i. do), if you open an animated .GIF file in program like Photo Editor, Paint Shop Pro, or whatever, all u. see is a static image. But if u. double-click & open in Pix & Fax Viewer then u. will see the animation. This comes in handy when browsing a folder of animated files to decide which one to use (like example attached here….)

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Yes MarkD, I discoved another interesting feature that is about the only thing I like about the XP Pix & Fax Viewer, and that was my video mail, and small video clips which previously (on my other machines) show up in a small frame, can be enlarged several sizes as required in the fax viewer. Since my picture program happily runs gif’s within it, I am pleased with that program. But tiz good to know they also work in the XP viewer, something I have not checked, but in time I certainly will have a need of that facility. Cannot imagine having gif’s I cannot see working.

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You and MarkD should take a look at SuperJPG gra[hics viewer. I’ve used it since way before XP came along and it will show the animation in GIFs.

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Hi Al, yes I had a quick looksee, probably does the same as the little program I use, (which as you say, has been around a long time, well before ME, 2000 & XP). I’ve used it since it was beta, now a very popular program which is packaged and sold. Needless to say I am still using the original from way back when it was free, before the manufacturers blew out the size by adding a ton of features I don’t need, to compete with other fancy picture programs. Personally I like simple, but then again I am just a simple girl!

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Seems to have been a bit of here. Thanks for all the comments so far. Coming back to the original topic it seems that I should backup my Outlook contact details in a couple of formats. OK will do.

Another specific question (and maybe this should be at the word forum) relates to all of those lovely macros I wrote using WordBasic (learned from the Hacker’s Guide). Most of those work in Word97, although a little slow. Does this ‘downward compatibility’ continue with Office XP? or can I Xpect Problems. I would love to get into VB and update them all – but lack the time to do it.

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The Annoyances.org web site has an article that explains how to disable this annoying new “feature” in XP by editing Registry:

How do I turn off the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer as my default image viewer?

This may save you trouble of having to disable viewer for each graphics file type one at a time. (The site has lots of other good stuff, highly recommended!)

HTH

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Both good links, thank you, thank you, thank you!

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The example you gave about Outlook Contacts data is a good one! Outlook is a pain in the tushie! I use it only for the Calendar and Contacts capability and only because it would “synch” with my little Rex Pro PDA. The best way to “protect” yourself with Outlook is to EXPORT any of the subsets you think you might need. The only trouble is, MS doesn’t give you too many choices of export file types, so you have to hope and cross your fingers. The last time I did mine, I was switching to a Palm PDA, so I exported each subset TWICE – as .CSV and .TXT and still I struck out. The Palm calendar software will only import a file type that Outlook doesn’t create. Good luck…..

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BigAl, I’m curious about more details of your ‘view’ of Outlook. Are you upset because MS dosen’t put a format out that Palm accepts? Why didn’t Palm accept a format that MS outputs? I’m pretty sure that Outlook was around when the first Palm was released . I’ve not had problems migrating data and settings from Office 95 -> 97 -> 2000 -> XP.

Joe

--Joe

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I only used the Palm example ’cause it is fairly current in my timeline. Maybe you took more “upset” from my comments than intended. The Outlook Calendar and Contacts subsets that I used are great working tools. Easy to use and right up my alley. What I don’t like is MS’s (and a lot of other vendors as well) inconsistency between IMPORT and EXPORT. On the import side, there are a whole slew of products they accept data from, including the somewhat-usual comma and tab delimited formats. However on the export side, you won’t find nearly as many choices. I forgot now which one was which, but for example the VCard format is available for one and not the other (meaning Calendar and Contacts). Palm really had no bearing on my feeling about the fact that software producers should ALL make two or three of the usual file formats available for import AND export of data.

I know I sound like it sometimes, but I am NOT a big-brother Microsoft hater! I’d just like to see more portability standardization. But, that slides against the grain of protective marketing! By the way, I wish Bowlie good luck with the impending new Office. I haven’t had the need yet, so I’m still running Office 2000.

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Al, I thought I would toss out that the exporting piece is a lot more of a pain in the than the importing side. Outlook will dump to a tab or comma-delimited text file when you export, which is a nearly universal way of storing data. Since Microsoft owns the source code to some of the other listed applications, it makes perfect sense that they allow exporting to say, Access. They know and have access to the specs for that data format. Many competitors out there fight interoperability just as much if not more than Outlook – the current state of Instant Messaging sums it up nicely!

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Many competitors out there fight interoperability

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[/indent] You’re absolutely right, Mark. That’s why my intended tongue-in-cheek comment about Outlook being a pain in the tushie. MS will import data from Sidekick, Lotus Notes, et. al., but you don’t see any EXPORT capability TO the file formats of those products. Can’t say as I blame them. Anyway, hey Bowlie, if I were you, I would do a little exporting and put the files away somewhere for safekeeping, hoping that the optimism of your IT people is justified. I bet it will be!

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