[Eric Valdescaro]

Preface: Before anyone hammers me on why did we migrate to Office 2007, let me first say that we have had students entering the university with Office 2007 already on their laptops for awhile and so that in order to maintain compatibility, we have institutionally had to accept migrating to the 2007 platform. Ok so now that that is out of the way...

For anyone who is not on Office 2007, you should know that at least for Word and Excel, Microsoft released the products so that users can keep the old 97-2003 (non-XML) document type defaults. This was very nice of them to do. Unfortunately, Blackbaud doesn't appear to have offered that same luxury to its Raiser's Edge clients.

It should be noted that although RE 7.81+ are compatible with Office 2007 that Blackbaud only modified their product to output in the new .docx format when integrating with Word to perform merges. Period. If your office would like to maintain compatibility with the old 97-2003 .doc format for awhile until the rest of your institution is up on Office 2007, tough. Raiser's Edge won't allow it -- at least not on V 7.82 which is what we're on.

Here's what happens:

- Let's say you set your Word 2007 default to .doc.

- When you attempt to perform a mail/ack letter/receipt merge in RE, it will default the file format to .docx which can not be changed simply by removing the x (that will give you a file with extension .doc.docx) because Blackbaud has forced these "Office 2007 compatible" versions to default to the XML document format when it recognizes that you have Office 2007 installed.

- Let's say you accept the .docx extension (because you have no other choice) and continue with the merge, when Word 2007 opens up, you will get a useless error message that tells you nothing about the true reason for the problem (do any ever really do?)

- So the only wayto avoid this is to retain the Word 2007 default of .docx -- at least while performing RE Word merges.

Basically, our beef with Blackbaud is why couldn't they have simply gone a little further to have RE check the default setting within Word and then choose your document type based on that? This would give clients the flexibilty to run RE with settings in alignment with Word and make life easier. HELLO?

So if your site is contemplating migrating to Office 2007, AND you do Word merges through RE, BUT want to maintain the .doc format for compatibility purposes for awhile after you migrate, I would hold off for as long as you reasonably can, otherwise you'll be stuck with your staff person (or staff people) having to swtich defaults all the time.

-Eric

[Peter Gulka]

Just finished a big fight with Blackbaud about this. I was told the
fix is confirmed for 7.84 which is due out "in the next 4-6 weeks". In
my opinion this should be made a patch item. We had to find a machine
that wasn't yet upgraded to 2007 so we could do our merges in 2003.

[Eric Valdescaro]

Thanks for the reply on this Pete. I agree it should be a patch compatible with versions 7.81+. We just did our upgrade to v 7.82 right before the new year and I'm not in any type of mood to do another.

Our workaround was to create two REG files that when double-clicked set your Word 2007 default to either 2007 or 2003. Essentially, they take the place of having to click on the "flower" icon in the upper left corner, select Word options, select Save, and the set the default file type.

Although double-clicking seems easy enough, it's never easy explaining to non-technical folks. So they had to be trained to double-click the 2007 REG file before merging and click the 2003 REG file after merging.

I'm willing to share the code for these REG files if anyone is interested.

-Eric

[mwittman]

Great info, everyone, thanks for posting all this.

[ereastman]

Thanks for posting in such detail about this issue, Eric. I did a short post about this on the Blackbaud forums myself, and after complaining got them to modify their "compatability" statement (BB315290).

I have been very frustrated that Blackbaud tech support staff are not actively testing in Office 07 and cannot help with any problems I am having. I am beta testing in 07 at my org. and the compatability issues with the other staff who are still on the older Office versions is a big headache, especially as the db manager I set up everything for the other staff, which ends up as jumbled symbols to their older Office versions.

I am glad to hear that Blackbaud is addressing this issue in the next update. What also is annoying me is after merging, the spell check is automatically disabled, and in the older Office versions there was a posted Blackbaud solution for this, but now that Office is totally different, there is no fix that I can figure out to get it to turn back on, which is a little annoying to have to cut and paste letters into a new doc when there is the need to personalize to make sure that no spelling errors are made.

This situation is a double headache - the horrible re-do of Word combined with Blackbaud's behind the curve lack of support on this new software and the issues regarding the bright idea of the file extension change by microsoft. My tech guys have advised me to give up and go back to the old Office, but I am stubbornly hoping that BB gets its act together and works out these problems - hopefully the more we complain they might actually listen.