On 3/28/01 9:30 PM, "Jan Martel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Well, I fixed it. I don't understand why this mattered, but in case it will
> help anyone else at some future time, here's what had "reverted" Word and
> Excel to saving as Office 98 documents. A few weeks ago, I decided to
> partition my hard drive, so that in case anything went wrong I wouldn't have
> as big a problem (I'm starting to wonder if that was a mistake, but it's
> done). I divided the HD into a system partition, an applications partition,
> a documents partition and a partition for a duplicate of the system.
> Everything seemed fine. Then this week I noticed that Excel had reverted to
> saving as Excel 98. So had Word. I tried bunches of things. I re-read for
> the umpteenth time the FAQ about this on the MS web site. One thing it
> suggested was putting Office 2001 at the root of your "main" drive
> (admittedly, this was if you had Office 98 installed as well, and I don't).
> Hmmm, maybe Office needs to be on the System drive for some reason? Why, I
> don't know. But when I copied it from the applications partition to the
> system partition and restarted, I was back to having 2001 documents. It
> doesn't make any sense to me, but OTOH, it works. Again, sorry to clutter up
> this mailing list with a relatively unrelated question and thanks for your
> suggestions.
Thank you very much for reporting back, Jan. Yes, it does make good sense.
Lots and lots of applications install various files in the System folder
in Preferences and in Extensions folders mainly. If the System folder is on
another volume (disk or partition), the application installer won't be able
to find it. Some application installers will probably error. Office keeps
_almost_ everything it needs in its own folder on the volume (partition)
where you put it. But there are still those pesky settings and other files
in the Microsoft folder in Preferences. And probably some other things as
well. It must have some "fail-safe" mechanism that creates settings files in
the Microsoft folder, but which go wrong if it can't communicate with this
folder. Perhaps it just recreates the last version that was there, or who
knows what? or perhaps the existence of that Excel(8) settings file tells it
that's the correct version. ?
Anyway, this is very useful to know. If I ever discover the actual mechanism
by which this happens, I'll let you know. (There are a LOT of people on
other lists and groups puzzled by this behaviour. I will pass on the word.)
--
Paul Berkowitz
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