Snow Leopard and Office 2004

Moving to Open Office may be a good idea. After I upgraded to Snow Leopard my Office 2004 & Office 2008 would not launch. So far Open Office is working fine.

Message was edited by: Hey Cricket

In the long run I'd buy the replacement disc, although I would instead recommend upgrading to Office 2008 which will be more compatible and will not require Rosetta to run a PPC application. Since you have the ability to use an academic purchase the upgrade isn't that expensive.

As for transferring what you have just copy the applications folder, the items in Applications Support, and the preference files. There are two Applications Support folders. One in the /Library/ folder and one in the /Home/Library/ folder. Preferences are all in the /Home/Library/Preferences/ folder.

It really doesn't matter if you make the Office transfer before or after upgrading to Snow. Before upgrading be sure you do the following:

1. Repair your hard drive and permissions.
2. Disable or remove any third-party utilities such as contextual menu items, preference panes, Internet plug-ins, and input managers. These may not be compatible. I would suggest disabling any login items as well.
3. Make a bootable clone of your existing system to a freshly formatted external drive.
4. Perform the Snow upgrade.

You can then test your third-party utilities for compatibility. You should quit all running applications and disconnect all peripherals for installation. Ideally you should boot into safe mode for the installation.

You do not need to follow these suggestions, but from my extensive experience these precautions are most likely to assure a trouble-free upgrade.

Office 2008 (version 12.2) seems to work fine for me with Snow Leopard. I have heard that Office 2004 works too. I say give it a try. I don't think it matters if you update the OS before or after you upgrade the OS.

You should make sure you have all the latest Office 2004 updates applied too.

Office 2008 works fine on my MacBook which is running Leopard. Hasn't given me a lick of trouble!

~Lyssa

I think that everyone has problems with Office software. But I have not run into any that seem to be related to Snow Leopard. I like the 2008 version better than 2004, mostly.

I used the Snow upgrade as an excuse to "erase & install," thus in one mighty swoop, getting Norton AV 11 (which Apple keeps darting ahead of) off my machine. I reinstalled, Leopard and the Ilife apps, did the updates, and then installed Snow. *I wish now I'd re-installed my Office 04 and done the updates BEFORE installing Snow*. The Office 2004 suite installed on Snow, but after installation, there was no *Microsoft updater* pop-up to bring my software up-to-date. I looked in applications, and could find no updater. I've installed from this disc before, and the updater has always been there, doing it's job after install. I opened a blank Word doc, went to "help," "find updates," and it said the updater couldn't be found. So, I've got Office software that is less secure than usual. I had to run to work, and didn't have time to throw the disc back in and look for a way to install updater after-the-fact. I haven't seen this issue elsewhere, but haven't looked hard yet. I saw a couple of sites that said Office 04 was fine with the Rosetta included in the Snow install, and the Apple guy I spoke with said it should be fine. Then again, an Apple guy told me my 2004 Adobe Creative Suite, and my 2004 Dreamweaver would work when I went to Leopard. Wrong! That stuff is expensive!!!

After the update Office 08 won't open and the so called enhanced print drive feature is driving me crazy since now there is no driver for my HP Laserjet 1020 unless I downgrade to Leopard 10.5

So now I can't print
Nor use word or excel
Annnnd Snow Leopard won't install the update for office


Any solution would be great other than re:formating the drive to start over again....Tried installing Roseta but nothing...

I originally had problems opening up Office '04 documents because I upgraded to Snow Leopard from Leopard and it kept telling me to install "Rosetta." A week later I open up a word document and it tells me to download "Rosetta" and gives me the option to download it (I presume over the internet). I click yes to download and "Presto" I immediately download Rosetta, it gets installed, and the next thing I do is open up word successfully.

Hope this helps everyone.

I just installed snow leopard and now I cant open anything on Office 04 (word, excell, etc....) I cant even open past documents. I installed Rosetta and now I'm trying to reinstall Office 04 using the handheld sync installer and it says it cant install it because the "Palm HotSync folder" is missing. I don't know what that is or where to find it. does anyone know what i can do?