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Comment by markus92 | Hacker News Reader

Installed a copy of Word 2003, document opened flawlessly immediately with default settings. Saving it from there converted it to a modern .doc which I could open with Office 365 and convert to PDF etc.

I think the moral of the story is that the Windows Office team seems to spend a bit more time on backwards compatibility.

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I think they spend extra time creating those backward compatibility problems just to make it harder to create a perfect third-party tool.

[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2618153/how-microsoft-was-...

I would be interested to see a PDF generated from Office 365 to understand how flawless it really is.

Here you go, exported from desktop Word to PDF.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lnaSr22l3kQbmFHnxg3Ggd3-46v...

Full version string:

Microsoft® Word for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2311 Build 16.0.17029.20140) 64-bit

Right. So all the images are missing. LibreOffice still gives the best conversion I think.

Yeah, that’s why you need Word 2003 for the images, it’s a deprecated format full of security holes I guess.

Ah… yeah I was wondering why they would deprecate an image format at all. My understanding is that Word in the old days serialized what was in memory, maybe that was a little too exploitable with images?

Not sure just curious not even sure where to look that one up honestly.

Digging through the files a bit I think the images are in PICT format which is very specific to Macs (the original ones). Its not surprising that modern Word doesn't support those that well as they are actually somewhat complicated kinda-vector image format. I am surprised that even Word 2003 implemented PICT on Windows.

It's not “kinda-vector”, it's a metafile format for QuickDraw operations (Windows did the same later with WMF, which was a list of GDI operations).

http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/PICT

Imagemagick supports it. What's more important, QuickDraw source is available, so not only we can have “some” conversion, we can also reason about its correctness (to some extent — according to comments, it's from 1982-1985).

https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-sour...

Extracting raw embedded PICT files from the document and working with them would be the best way to get proper charts. To see what appeared on paper, we can direct emulated system output to an emulated printer, or capture the PostScript commands and rasterize them at the resolution that was used by device available to the author. It is well known that Word for Windows stored last used printer settings in the document, so it could be the same for files produced by Mac version.

(M-hm, it says “Laserwriter” at 0x10097. Maybe they all do.)

Because Microsoft made the most popular document editor for both Windows and Mac, they had to deal with interoperability of two versions of their own software. Supporting WMF/EMF on Mac meant they had to drag GDI implementation along with Office (luckily, the reference could be grabbed from their colleagues). Supporting PICT on Windows meant they had to re-implement QuickDraw primitives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Word

https://news.microsoft.com/1999/04/26/office-98-built-for-th...

It is totally possible that Office applications used built-in PICT parser even on Mac to make things simple, and not rely on 15 years of compatibility layers in the system.

Probably the completely best would be to use LO for the images and Word otherwise... needs some manual twiddling but I suspect that way you can get pretty much perfect layout and images.

Office applications up to (and probably including) version 2010 break and crash on latest Windows versions. That behavior varies based on Office service packs and updates installed. You were lucky to be able to just save the document.

Unless, of course, you've found some portable version on the net that packs ThinApp and an assortment of old system libraries under the hood.

I had no problems installing a vanilla Office 2003 on Windows 11 23H2. Got the iso from archive.org and it installed without a hitch.

This has not been my experience, I'm wondering where you heard this information from?

I have Office 2003 (or maybe it's 2007?) installed on my work computer, no problems. It even happily coexists with whatever modern Office version I have installed on there too.

I also have Office 2010 installed on my home computer and my husband uses it all the time. No issues.

Both computers are running Windows 10, so I guess it's not technically "the latest version."

It might be forgotten now, but Office was a trade show for new ideas in Microsoft. Its UI routinely used non-standard controls, and relied on knowing how things move under the hood. On the other hand, it was one of the most important applications which had to remain compatible with any Windows system. There is probably an enormous amount of Office-specific fixes in Windows, and that complex and brittle symbiosis requires continuous work to function.

There is a multi-dimensional community of people who deal with old software and old hardware. It has noticed that compatibility of Windows 10 with old versions of Office got worse in releases made in 2018. It seems that those old Office versions were finally removed from integration testing environments at that time.

Problems are different in different applications (Excel might be the most sensitive). Problems may depend on language version. Problems may only affect certain actions (say, crashing during spelling checks). Problems may depend on updates installed — and certain official updates were known to break some applications for some people even before that, so they certainly were not as thoroughly tested as regular ones.

It is great if everything works for you. It is also possible that your specific combination of COM objects and silently overloaded SxS libraries from multiple Office versions works, while some other combination wouldn't.

This thread is amazing to me in lots of ways, but this line:

> I have Office 2003 (or maybe it's 2007?)

... is the stand out jaw-dropping moment.

I use Word 2003 for outline mode today, because for me, it's the final version that's usable. Word 2007 has the "Fluent UI" with a ribbon, making it unusable to me.

I boggled that someone might not notice what was a deal-breaking total UI change that drove me off a platform I'd been using for 19 years.

What I have installed on my work computer is the last version of Office without the ribbon and before the new XML file formats. I don't know off the top of my head if that's 2003 or 2007. What exactly is so "jaw dropping" about not remembering exact version numbers?

I don't use it day-to-day, but I have a few legacy "spreadsheets" (really small programs) from clients I have to work with once in a while that have macros that don't work right in modern office.

Ahh, OK, now I understand!

Sorry. I meant no offence.

There's a big difference -- at least for me -- between "I can't remember if it has the ribbon or not" (very surprising) and "I don't want the ribbon but I don't remember which version introduced it" (perfectly legit).

My apologies.

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