MS Office 2007 Compatibility Pack with Office 97

[dencorso]

  Wow! Way to go! Great work, you're reporting! Thanks for sharing your findings.
 
 

The good news is that Excelcnv.exe as a "Office Isolated Converter Environment" works with the "Windows NT 4.0 sp6" compatibility mode is both directions i.e. converts xlsx-to-xls and xls-to-xlsx.

 
Would you please elaborate some more about that?

How is it one can use Excelcnv.exe as a "Office Isolated Converter Environment" in 9x/Me?

[deomsh]

"Office Isolated Converter Environment" is the internal name of the Fileformatconvertor (as far as I know), but "oice" is also the commandline option for silent standalone conversion.

 

Conversion xlsx-to-xls or xls-to-xlsx is possible in three ways, all working in my 98SE installation, KernelEx compatibility modes as above. Xlsx to xls only in two ways, Excelcnv gives a xlsx-file with extension xls!

 

I.   Use Shell option "Save as" with dialogs, choice of extension etcetera. Uses Moc.exe

II.  Use commandline for Moc.exe: Moc -f "Station\Path\File". Extension xlsx or xls. Further same as Shell option.

III. Silent commandline with Excelcnv.exe: Excelcnv -oice "Station\Path\File" "Station\Path\File". First extension existing, second target.

Edited December 18, 2014 by deomsh

[Dave-H]

Just to add my experience, I had given up on being able to use any of the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack on my Windows 98SE Office XP installation, until I read this thread, and I thought I'd give it a try.
I have the installation file for the base install, so I extracted the .msi installer file from it with Universal Extractor.
To my amazement, without any Orca modification, it ran and installed!
Word now opens docx files fine for reading, which is all I really wanted it for. I'm not interested in being able to save.
PowerPoint and Excel still don't open the newer formats, just throwing error messages, but Word was the important one for me, and I'm really pleased that it works!
I do have the installation file for SP3 of the Pack, but I guess that installing that is a no-no. When I run it it says it needs MS Installer version 3, and Universal Extractor doesn't seem to produce anything meaningful from it.

[deomsh]

Set KernelEx 4.5.2 compatibility mode for excelcnv.exe to "Windows NT 4.0 sp6". If that doesn't work, for msxml5.dll too.

Edited May 27, 2019 by deomsh
Address first sentence no longer exists in thread

[Dave-H]

So it does!

A shame that the same trick doesn't work for PowerPoint.

[deomsh]

In fact, FileFormatConverters consists of three programs (wordconv.exe, excelcnv.exe and ppcnvcom.exe) with their own dll's and five common ones. Those three programs can be used one-way standalone (commandline) and do only conversions from the old to the new format.

Another program, Moc.exe, can do conversions in both directions by giving the appropriate program the right "instructions". Moc.exe also has a function in saving the resulting file. Their interprocess "communication" is with help of a proxy. For wordconc.exe the proxy wordcnvpxy.cnv is used, for excelcnv.exe the proxy excelcnvpxy.dll and for ppcnvcom.exe the proxy ppcnvpxy.dll. If one of the Office programs opens or save a file DIRECTLY in the new file format, Office "communicates" by means of one of the proxy dll's.

In case of the new Powerpoint file format, KernelEx SOMEHOW fails in the necessary interprocess "communication".

Since 2014 I tried to find out what the culprit is, but my only succes was to establish commandline-conversion with ppcnvcom (ppt2pptx only, this is by design!). I hope one day the further development of KernelEx will help. Since I am not a programmer I can't do anything in that direction.