Any Issues Upgrading from Word 2003 to 2007?

[Guest]

Hello. We have the option in my department to upgrade from Word 2003 to Word 2007. My team still has some help projects in RoboHelp for Word. Before we decide to upgrade, I was wondering if anyone else using RoboHelp 7 (for Word) has upgraded to Microsoft Word 2007, and if they have encountered any issues. Thanks for any input.

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi happileigh.

You should be OK upgrading to Office 2007. Just be aware that RH has to be installed after Word so you will also have to reinstall RH. What I would do is see if you can upgrade a non-production PC, install RH and run a few tests.

[Peter Grainge]

Colum, sorry to contradict but it should not be necessary to uninstall and reinstall RH7.

Also in RH for Word, you may need to change the version of Word used. Not sure if that happens automatically.

[RoboColum_n_]

No problem Peter. Just out of interest, do you know if this applies to previous versions of RH or just RH7.

[Peter Grainge]

The change was made in RH7.

[David Hurlston]

You will find the combination of RH7 and Word 2007 to be very slow in operating the basic RH functions. For example, inserting a link takes about 1 minute on my system.

If you have not already made the change, I would suggest staying with Word 2003 until Adobe fixes this..

[David Hurlston]

Here's another issue, This is RH7 with Office 2003 to get away from the slowness with Office 2007:

Install RH7 - no problems compiling.
Install update to 7.2 - rtf files getting corrupted on some projects
Reinstall RH 7 - no problem
Install update to 7.2 - problem.
etc.

I was also getting rtf corruption problems with Office 2007

Does RH7 for Word hate just me, or are others suffering? :-)


I am really surprised that so few have complained about the slowness.

[Guest]

Thanks for all the helpful feedback, everyone. Here's an update, just fyi. I loaded Office 2007 today, and seem to be encountering one of the issues described by David Hurlston. When I try to create a new popup, it takes a little over one minute for the Insert Popup window to appear. Then when I select the topic to which I want to link and click OK, it takes another 10 seconds or so for the link to appear.

I also received the "Microsoft Office Word has encountered a problem and needs to close" error five times in the past hour, when just trying to add new topics. I ran Microsoft Office Diagnostics, and it was unable to diagnose the cause of the crash. I'm using RoboHelp for Word 7.0, Build 7.02.001. (I have the full Adobe Technical Communication Suite with all of the latest updates installed, and just loaded Office 2007 today, along with all of the latest Windows and Office updates.)

This is the perfect time for our team to upgrade to Office 2007 since we're at the very beginning of a release, so I'm going to continue testing to see if I can figure out why it's a bit sluggish and why it's crashing. I just wanted to follow up on my original post in case any of this info is helpful.

On a semi-related note... I'm usually pretty good about finding my way around in new user interfaces, but it took me about ten minutes to figure out how to access the Insert Popup window (due to the new Word UI). If anyone knows of a handy reference guide for people upgrading to RoboHelp for Word 2007, let me know. I checked the LiveDocs for RoboHelp for Word, but the version I found currently contains the old icons I'm used to. (I'm hoping to find some type of quick reference that explains where to find things that have moved and/or changed icons. I found a great interactive tool on Microsoft's site, but it seems to be specific to Word docs, without addressing the RoboHelp-specific options.)

Thanks again for all the input!

[David Hurlston]

At this point, I have to say that the only well-behaved combination is RH6 with Office 2003 on an XP machine.

I am hearing rumblings about RH8, but I have no idea if it addresses the problems in RH7

[Guest]

Here's a new update... When I opened a project in RoboHelp for Word this week, suddenly the sluggishness in launching the Insert Popup window seems to be fixed. (Note that I downloaded RoboHelp updates when 7.03 came out a couple weeks ago, but it was still sluggish.) The only explanation I can think of is that I had a Windows automatic update a few days ago, so maybe that fixed something? Just wanted to add an update that at this time, the sluggishness previously described by two of us seems to have improved for me.

[Peter Grainge]

Since posting the above, David Hurlston reported the same experience. Thanks for posting this, it helps when others look up this problem.