Yes, Word 97 will run fine under Windows XP.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Charlie''s Word VBA questions"
m wrote in message
...
Thank you for the info, Suzanne.
I have had several cases where the text no longer fits within a table
cell,
so I bet you are right. When I changed the spacing between cells from .03
to
.02, it fit OK. Unfortunately, I have hundreds of tables.
I wrote a macro using "Selection.Information" to show a MsgBox with the
exact position of the cursor in inches, points and twips. There is a
small
difference. For example, at the end of a given line, the measurement from
the left edge of the page in Word 97 was 6.19514 inches (446.05 points)
and
in Word 2003, it was 6.29097 inches (452.95 points). Even less than a
tenth
of an inch (or even a hundredth) can really make quite a difference.
Interestingly, the distance from the top of the page was LESS. In Word
97,
it was 6.36111 inches (458.00 points) and in 2003, it was 6.27361 inches
(451.70 points). This also doesn't explain why a word in another
paragraph
was moved up to the preceding line.

In fact, I haven't really tested this very much, but even the macro
display
(which includes spaces to "columnize" the measurement text) was different.

I am supposing there is no solution to this. I would prefer to not do so,
but I again ask whether Word 97 can be installed under XP. I can imagine
this might cause a whole new set of problems and seems like going
backwards.

I really appreciate your ideas and advice.

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

I suspect there really was a change in metrics somewhere along the line.
I
don't remember whether it was between 97 and 2002 or earlier that I saw
this, but I know that I had a complex lease form that, when opened in a
newer version, was actually cutting text off at the edge. I forget
whether
the problem was with table cells that weren't quite wide enough any more
or
right-aligned tab stops that had to be moved a hair in from the margin
or
what, but it was very annoying.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Charlie''s Word VBA questions"
m wrote in message
...
Thanks, Suzanne. Unfortunately, that didn't help.
Maybe it is helpful if I point out that (I'm rough estimating, not
counting)
about 60 % or so of the paragraphs are not a problem. This is
probably
because they are left justified and each line ends a sufficient
distance
from
the margin. I guess that about 30% or so of the paragraphs have one
or
more
words that flow to the next line. Probably only 2 or 3% of the
paragraphs
have (usually) only one or two words that flow to the preceding line
in
the
paragraph. This is rare.
Frankly, none of this makes any sense to me, since I verified that the
font,
font size and margins did not change.
Is there any possibility that Word calculates space between words or
from
the end of a line to the margin, even if the paragraph is
left-justified?
If
so, could their algorithms have changed? I'm really clutching at
straws,
I
know.

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

You might also try selecting "Do full justification like
WordPerfect" in
Tools | Options | Compatibility. This usually compresses justified
lines
a
bit.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Charlie''s Word VBA questions"
m wrote in
message
...
Thank you, Graham.
In fact, the old printer driver (HP) is installed on the XP
machine as
well
as a new (Canon) printer driver. I have switched back and forth
between
printers, with "Use printer metrics" both On and Off. While I
could
sometimes see very minor differences in the display, that did not
resolve
the
problem. And yet, a very small difference such as right indenting
a
test
paragraph by -.05" solved the problem for that one paragraph. I
guess
I
don't really understand how Word uses the printer to format the
display
and
print.
I also tried to install the old Arial font after renaming it
"OldArial",
but
Windows was smart enough to prevent it. I also took a snapshot of
a
test
paragraph on both machines and viewed them at 10x zoom. I didn't
see
any
differences in the pixels for each letter nor for spacing between
letters.
It was just a guess on my part.

"Graham Mayor" wrote:

This is nothing to do with any difference between the file
formats
of
Word
97 and Word 2003 (which are effectively the same) but with the
fact
that
different printer drivers (and possibly different releases of
the
font
files) were used to create the documents. Word formats according
to
the
current printer driver. You would have to have the same printer
driver
(and
I mean the driver not the printer) and font outlines present as
when
you
created the document in Word 97. Adding Word 97 to your current
installation
will not affect the issue.
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/TextReflow.htm

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org


Charlie''s Word VBA questions wrote:
Can I install Word 97 in Windows XP? I have Office 2003 with
Word
2003 already installed.
However, I have many 97 documents that, when opened on 2003,
line
spacing and text formatting is sufficiently changed to cause
many,
many problems. These are student workbooks with font sizes of
12
and
14 points. Words on a line flow to the next line causing
paragraph/page overflow. Sometimes a word actually fits on
the
line
above. These documents contain a lot of formulas and
programming
code examples so formatting and spacing is very precise and
critical.
Even text forming formulas and program code in a table may
overflow
resulting in misalignment of lines that must be precisely
aligned.
I
have tried every option I can think of including all
compatibility
options as Word 6.0, 97 and 2003, with printer metrics turned
on
and
off. The only fixes I have come up with are doing things like
reducing font size by .5 point, setting paragraph right indent
by
even as little as negative .05 inches. But I would have to do
this
line by line or paragraph by paragraph. I spent nearly a week
just
finding (But not yet correcting) problems in ten documents.
I am considering installing Word 97 to solve this problem
(although I
am not sure it will). What conflicts will I encounter? Can I
keep
2003 and 97? Is there any other way to "freeze" spacing?