Office 2007 and 64-bit Office 2010 Cannot Coexist on the Same Computer

Are you planning to upgrade from Office 2007 to the 64-bit (x64) version of Office 2010? Take note that you will have to completely uninstall all of your current Office 2007 applications, including Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, Access, OneNote, InfoPath, Project, SharePoint Designer, Groove, Visio, and Publisher.

“Why should I care,” you ask? The main reason is that many common Office add-ins and application that interact with Office will not work with the 64-bit version of Office. You may find yourself unable to use an add-in or application on which you rely heavily. For example, if you rely on an add-in for Word to be able to save and load documents to your organization’s document management system, you might be out of luck until the vendor creates a 64-bit version of the add-in.

Read more about Office 2010.

Warning: Upgrading to SharePoint Designer 2010? Beware!

I just installed upgraded my Office install from Office 2007 to the 64-bit (x64)version Office 2010. I had to completely remove my Office 2007 applications including SharePoint Designer 2007, because no Office 2007 applications can coexist with any 64-bit Office 2010 application.

“That’s OK,” I thought; “who wants the old stuff when I can have the shiny new stuff?”

I fired up SharePoint Designer 2010, eager to do some edits to our SharePoint 2007. That’s when I was greeted with this lovely error:

“Microsoft SharePoint Designer cannot be used to edit web sites on servers prior to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.  To edit these sites, you need to use SharePoint Designer 2007.”

I can’t use SharePoint Designer 2010 with my SharePoint 2007 site nor with my customers’ SharePoint 2007 sites? Really? I hope that whoever at Microsoft made the decision that SharePoint Designer 2010 would not support SharePoint 2007 sites was able to find another job after he/she was unceremoniously fired! Could you imagine if Word 2010 could not open Word 2007 or Word 2003 files? Ridiculous.

Ok, so I can’t use SharePoint Designer 2010 to edit my SharePoint 2007 sites and I can’t install SharePoint Designer 2007 on my computer. What’s the answer? Virtualization. I’m spinning up a virtual machine that will host an instance of Office 2007, as well as a few other apps.

Read more about Office 2010.

Microsoft warns: Don’t use 64-bit Office 2010

Microsoft has issued a warning in its Office 2010 Technology Guarantee FAQ about installing the 64-bit (x64) versions of Office 2010 applications:

Will a 64-bit version of the Office 2010 product be available?

Yes, 64-bit Office 2010 product upgrades will be available. However we [Microsoft] strongly recommend most users install 32-bit version of Office 2010 on both 32 and 64-bit Operating Systems because currently many common add-ins for Office will not function in the 64-bit edition. The 64-bit installation of Microsoft Office 2010 products will be available for users who commonly use very large documents or data set and need Excel 2010 programs to access greater than 2GB of memory. There may be technical issues with the 64-bit version and in order to install a 64-bit version of Office 2010 product users must have a 64-bit supported operating system on their PC.

“Why should I care,” you ask? You may find yourself unable use an add-in or application on which you rely heavily. For example, if you rely on an add-in for Word to be able to save and load documents to your organization’s document management system, you might be out of luck, until the vendor creates a 64-bit version of the add-in.

In addition to the add-ins not working, users will have to remove all of their Office 2007 applications in order to install even one Office 2010 app. This is because Office 2007 is 32-bit (x86) and can not coexist with the 64-bit version of Office 2010.

Let’s recap on 64-bit Office 2010:

• Most add-ins won’t work in 64-bit Office 2010
• You can’t keep the 32-bit version of Office including 2007, in which the add-ins did work
• 64-bit Office 2010 may have technical issues beyond the 32-bit version

The conclusion seems clear: unless you have a clear need for the large memory access that the 64-bit version of Office 2010 allows, stick with the 32-bit version.

Read more about Office 2010.