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Coexistence of two Microsoft Office Word versions

July 16, 2009 Leave a comment
Yesterday I received an invitation to Microsoft® Office 2010 Technical Preview Program.  Smeško z odprtimi usti
Really great piece of software so far – it brings us some interesting improvements like ribbon in Outlook and Visio, new Office menu,…

At first I was really happy to join this program but after only one day I already encountered few problems. And I solved them all 🙂
 
The biggest and most irritating was when Outlook didn’t display Reading Pane – it was showing folders and I was able to select them but there was no list of folder content and no Reading Pane. The only working solution was to fully uninstall and then install Office 2010 (tried Reinstall with no success). I have no idea why this has happened – it could be because of some extension for Outlook 2007 or something completely different (I Installed Office 2010 on my system where there was already Office 2007 and I didn’t upgrade or uninstall it – same goes for all extensions for Office apps).
 
And here we come to the second problem – coexistence of two Microsoft Office Word versions. If you had at any point in past on your system two Word versions you have surly encountered this problem. When you use one of them and then you run the other one you always have to wait for that annoying window to close (something like "Please wait while Word is configuring") – but no more! The solution I’m going to tell you about is pretty simple. Actually I’m going to show you two different solutions with the same effect 🙂 And none of them involves any kind of virtual system.
 
The first one is really easy: all you have to do is to run the other Word (the one you don’t use often) with /a switch. You can create new shortcut with target value of something like:
"c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\WINWORD.EXE" /a
or you can add /a switch to your existing shortcut in Start menu.
This switch is intended to start Word and prevent add-ins and global templates (including the Normal template) from being loaded automatically. The /a switch also locks the setting files; that is, the setting files cannot be read or modified if you use this switch. You can find more useful switches in KB 210565.
 
The second solution is for those who like to edit registry. You have to create new DWORD (32-bit) value named NoRereg with value data equal to 1 at:
– HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options (Word 2007),
– HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Options (Word 2003),
– HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Word\Options (Word 2002) or
– HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Word\Options (Word 2000).
 
Second solution is better because it doesn’t limit your daily work in any way. (More info in KB 928091)
 
Categories: Microsoft