Thursday, September 14, 2006

Before you upgrade to Office 2007 Beta 2 TR

Office 2007 beta 2 technical refresh was released today. The office client applications (word, excel, powerpoint) are an upgrade. As excited as we all are, do not upgrade to beta 2 TR until you understand a known issue in technical refresh. In the installation/deployment training live meeting, the speaker stated that due to schema changes, any office document saved in the office 2007 beta 2 format, may NOT open in the technical refresh. Yes, may NOT open.

The workaround is to open each document in the beta 2 install and save them in Office 2003 format. Then, when you install technical refresh, the documents will open. I know for our RDP project, this is a big pain in the neck. We have dozens of documents saved in 2007 format. There was no indication on whether this would be fixed for RTM. Since they are calling it a known issue, I am hopeful.