I love my Office 97 (I fear change And won't pay bill gates hundreds of dollars for an upgrade to office 2007).
I installed office 97 on my new Vista computer.
Everything works (word, access powerpoint, excel) except outlook.
i get an error message that says "cannot start microsoft outlook".
any thoughts?
I do not use outlook for email but for Notes and Contacts. I'd be fine if one of the new windows apps had the equivalent of outlook note but they do not. I would sync my Palm V handlheld with outlook and have all my necessary information at my fingertips.
Right click the outlook shortcut and select properties
Select compatibility tab
Check run this porgram in compatibility mode for:
And choose an os its known to work on.
If this still doesnt work, try right clicking on the outlook shortcut and select "run as administrator"
There is a Vista to 7 upgrade path in place same as there was an XP to Vista upgrade path. (Meaning you can do an "inplace upgrade" or install it over the current OS)
No such OS upgrade path Exists from XP to 7 however, you must go XP > Vista > Win7 a rather bonehead maneuver by M$ after they allowed people to pay extra to get XP instead of Vista on new systems.
As far as the MS Outlook 97 thing, MS does make a point of changing some of the DLLs and APIs on occasion (Many of them infact in Win7) as a result some programs won't have backwards compatibility, obviously the older outlook is one such casualty, I would not expect a newer OS to suddenly start supporting it without some major tweaking of your DLLs.
(Run Outlook while in a developer/debug mode, watch for DLL calls that it can't complete when starting, get an old copy of said DLL and place into the System32 directory.)
Way more hassle than it's worth when you consider the excellent free and opensource alternatives like Thunderbird+Lightning plugin or Sunbird from Mozilla. (These products have been around a LONG time, since before FF became well known, so don't fear that they might be under developed.)
Also the built in Windows Mail (Previously Outlook Express) is becoming continuously more full-featured as newer OSes are released.
Sorry, Outlook 97 won't work (our test was on Windows 7, but I'm guessing Vista is similar). Here's the migration path for the old mail to be visible in a new, free client:
1. Download Outlook 2010 trial. Install and make it your default e-mail client.
2. Import the old mail (it's something like outlook.pst) into Outlook.
3. Download and install Thunderbird. You might install the "Lightning" calendar extension too, but I'm unsure whether old Outlook calendar will import.
4. Use the import tool in Thunderbird.
5. Uninstall Outlook 2010.
...Microsoft has a "Microsoft Live" upgrade path too, but you need Outlook to be available to translate the .pst file(s).
Note: This is not yet a validated method, so ... YMMV.
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