Just a note to remind that any of your organizations that are carrying along archives of older MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files as part of your organizations records need to start checking how those files are treated by the newer Windows operating systems. You are likely to find that documents and presentations created in Office 95 and Office 98 either open as "read only" files, or not at all, in the newer operating systems due to security and registry settings. Of course, the same has been true for some time with the MS-DOS based Word files from the early 1990s.

From an archive standpoint, the obsolescence of fifteen year old electronic file formats is not a very good sign, for organizations that have a "historical" mission. It points out the need to either maintain a computer or two with older operating systems, or to be sure to download the stand alone file readers that were produced for distribution with some of the older file formats.

I am just reporting here what I have observed recently in accessing older files. Additional comment from some of our software and computer knowledgeable members on this could be very helpful.

PC

If you have this problem, try "Apache OpenOffice" it has good support for older file formats.

-Hudson

This has been a concern of professional archivists for at least the last couple of decades. I remember hearing these archivists twenty years ago saying that they were more comfortable with preserving paper records than having main-frame or PC computer files that are no longer readable.

Good, but imperfect, support for older formats. (Yes, I've found out the hard way.)

Yes, Open Office is a good program, but unfortunately it cannot open documents that are blocked by registry settings in Windows 7 and Windows 8. You can use the "trust center" to allow read-only access to several older Microsoft Office formats, but it will not let you edit the files.

I have found that on at least some older documents that open "read only" you can copy the text and paste it into a newer document format to save it for future use. This is particularly useful for important documents like safety handouts, tests, etc. that were created using the older versions of Microsoft Office programs. You could also print, scan, and OCR older documents into newer formats, but that is a lot more work to get to the same end result.

I located a Microsoft technical article stating they blocked access to Office 95 PowerPoint files beginning with Office 2003 service release 3.

I will add that it seems to be a reasonably good idea to print every document created in a Microsoft Office format to a companion .PDF file as a part of any new work. The .PDF format seems to remain readable longer than anything from MS Office.

PC

Usually, Microsoft 7/8 Office will open an older Word, Excel, or PPT in a "Compatibility Mode", whether it be an older 95/98 or newer 2003 file, read only or not. I can say from doing this with 2003 files that normally one can create a new "copy" of the outdated file by going to Save As and instead of selecting "97-2003" document, you select the current version. In Excel, for example, instead of saving the file as a "Excel 97-2003 Workbook" or "Excel 97-2003 Template", you save the file as a "Excel Workbook" which is by default the most current version of Office on the machine. By saving the file under the most current version, it creates a copy of the file that is no longer out-of-date. Even if it saves the new, updated copy as "Read Only", this can be changed under "Attributes" in the "General" tab of the "Properties" window for the specific file. Whereas with an older file, "Read Only" may very well indeed be permanent, with a current file "Read Only" can always be turned off.

Good point

The current version of Word Perfect Office runs under Windows 8.1 and can open and store almost anything including lotus 123 files

Bob H

I'm on Office Pro 2010 and have never had a problem opening really old MS Office files, though from time to time I have to do what Rainer Rails says to save in a new format before its updateable again. Also in Access you have a copy/repair tool which saves a new database from old or damaged mdb files.

There's also the problem of permanence, or lack thereof, of backups on CDs and magnetic media. None of these last 'forever' and you should have a program of renewing your backups on a periodic basis.

If you can update your file format ahead of Microsoft posting a registry change patch on your computer along with one of their periodic "updates" (which they are likely to do without telling you about it), you can stay ahead of the problems, but it is going to be interesting to see what happens after April 2014 when they drop the support for Windows XP. This coming event is dreaded in the railroad industry because there is a lot of equipment out there with legacy software that does not work with Windows 7 or 8. Running in virtual PC mode with XP under a later version of windows is not going to be a very good option when XP is no longer available or supportable.

This problem with legacy software is going to be an interesting challenge if any of these locomotives or other vehicles end up in preservation or on tourist lines. They are likely to need microprocessor system updates to replace outdated systems with more supportable equipment. Over the last few years my laptop computer has accumulated almost a dozen railroad industry supplier software programs for everything from HEP unit protective systems to cooling fan controllers and still-in-service but no longer produced locomotive microprocessor systems, that are all going to outdate along with Windows XP. Five to ten year old legacy software can still be essential to service a locomotive control system even though the manufacturer that produced it subsequently left the market, and there are several such systems still out there right now. Imagine the potential problems to keep those running ten years from now, and the cost to put something more supportable in place of them. I suspect that some currently operable equipment, when and if it gets to museums, will end up as static displays for lack of software support.

Going back to Microsoft files, opening any PowerPoint 95 or previous PowerPoint format in Windows 7 or 8 with Office 2010 provides a good example of Microsoft registry policy blocking the opening of older files.

PC

Even if a file opens as "read only", there normally no roadblocks preventing you from saving to another, more modern, format using the "Save As" option.

Jeff