Many people wonder if Windows 7 will work with legacy software.
Theoretically, anything that runs on Windows Vista should also run just fine under Windows 7.
One might assume that Microsoft would attempt to force people to upgrade their Office software (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access etc.) by making older versions incompatible with newer operating systems.
Of course they would also risk making enemies along the way. Besides, with Open Office, a free download, as competition, annoying users of legacy software would be pointless.
I installed a version of Office 2000 on the RC version of Windows 7 available to me at the time of this writing.
Microsoft Office 2000 installed just fine, and worked pretty much as it always has since as far back as I can remember.
So far I’ve tested Word and PowerPoint a fair bit, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft Excel.
I found no significant problems with any of the Office software I tried under Windows 7. Performance was excellent for the most part.
I did notice some minor irritations however.
Animated windows are painfully slow. If you open a dialogue box, such as search, you can literally watch it draw out the animations. It takes two seconds or so to open the search box. This is ridiculous!
I cured that problem by turning off animation, which is an unnecessary frill, and a waste of power if you are running your laptop off its battery.
The other strange thing I noticed happened when running PowerPoint and Word at the same time. When I switch between them, Word will often show a waiting cursor for quite a long time – ten, twenty, maybe thirty seconds or longer, before going back to normal. It gave me a bit of a fright a couple of times since I thought I was loosing my work.
It came back though and was fine. It is an occasional glitch. PowerPoint has done it once or twice as well.
So if you are thinking of getting Windows 7 and are wondering if some of your older software will still work, then certainly you will find that Office 2000 will function just fine.
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