Compatibility between Office 2004 and 2003

jamike

Registered
Hi Everyone!

I was wondering what some of the steps would be to make my Office 2004 as compatible with 2003 as possible. I am a college student and I am having a lots of trouble with sending my documents (doc, xls, ppt, pps) to my professors and these showing up all messed up on their PC's. Would it help if I delete all my fonts and only install those defaultly used on a PC version of Office 2003? I feel like fonts are a big part of this problem. If the answer is yes, how can I do something like this?

Thank you.
 
Weird, i never had problems when i was at college. One option is to send PDF files, as they will come out ok.

If you have an Intel mac you could also get windows and parallels and run PC office on your mac. This is what I do (i just upgraded to Office 2007 actually).
 
...

I was wondering what some of the steps would be to make my Office 2004 as compatible with 2003 as possible. ... Would it help if I delete all my fonts and only install those defaultly used on a PC version of Office 2003? I feel like fonts are a big part of this problem. If the answer is yes, how can I do something like this?

...
Office 2003 is probably more compatible with Office 2004 than with another Windows version of the suite. Without access to your setup, the most likely explanation for your problems is fonts. Office is supposed to be able to embed fonts in your documents, but that is a waste of space. In your assignments, use only fonts which have been supplied by Microsoft.
 
So can I go ahead and delete all the fonts in the FontBook and copy the fonts from someone's PC? Won't it mess up the other applications on my mac?

Also, is there a way of expanding the toolbars in Office 2004? They have hidden buttons at the end and it's impossible for me to drag the corner of a toolbar to expand it. What's the point of this? They hardly cover 2/3 of my screen and it would be useful to see the whole toolbar since there is space.

Thank you.
 
Are you sending the documents from Entourage? There is a bug in Entourage, by which the first attachment in a sent message is mangled. I don't recall if this is applicable to all Entourage users, but it is a reported bug.

Also, if you are sending to PC users, you may want to set the font in your documents to Arial or similar known equivilent PC font.

Don't mess with the fonts on your machine, unless you know which fonts the various apps and OS require to be present.

Just format your documents with a font that you are pretty sure exists on the PC as well. This means choose a font that Microsoft loves to install on either platform. The example I gave was Arial. You can be pretty sure that font is on the PC you are sending to.

There are other fonts in common on both platforms. If Arial is not an option (because it's uninteresting to look at), ask the recipient what fonts they generally use on their machine. You may be able to find a font in common that will be fine.
 
Is there a way to make Word load only those common fonts, so that every time when you run Word, you don't have to worry about picking a "compatible" font?

Thanks.
 
There is probably on-line Microsoft Office help to guide you through the process of setting up default fonts on new documents.
It won't however prevent you from have to look through the list of available fonts on the system if you want to choose a different font.

Get to know what the style sheets are and how to use them. Take a class if you need to.
 
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