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Office 2007 compatibility with MediaLab

  1. 07-27-2007, 6:16 AM#1
    jarvis24 Blair Jarvis, Administrator

    Office 2007 compatibility with MediaLab

    [edited from support email]

    I use MediaLab and Direct RT on a PC that does not currently run Microsoft 2007. I don't use that computer for anything but data collection, but my IR office is pressuring me to upgrade to Office 2007. Do you know if this will have any detrimental impact on my empirisoft software?


    and another..

    I'm having trouble getting MediaLab and Office 2007 to work together, am I the only one? So far I have tried editing the MediaLab preferences to point to a variety of locations in the Office 2007 directory with no success. I'm betting that there is something simple that I am overlooking. Please let me know what you think, thanks . . .
  2. 07-27-2007, 6:17 AM#2
    jarvis24 Blair Jarvis, Administrator
    Haven't heard of any trouble yet, but there's always a first! Have you tried leaving the word path in the preferences blank?

    [a few days later...]
    Just wanted to let you know that we have upgraded our workstations containing MediaLab 2006 to include Office 2007 and everything is working fine so far. Thanks so much again for your continued support . .


    Just curious.. what did you do to make MediaLab and Office 2007 work together? I recall at the beginning, you were having trouble, no?
  3. 05-19-2008, 4:49 PM#3
    jarvis24 Blair Jarvis, Administrator
    There has been one other outstanding issue with Office 2007. One user reported that PowerPoint presentations were taking a very long time to load as compared with earlier versions of Office. I do not know if other users have experienced this or if the issue was otherwise resolved. See the thread here:

    www.empirisoft.com/support/showthread.php?t=1002
  4. 12-19-2009, 5:40 AM#4
    jarvis24 Blair Jarvis, Administrator
    Just one other thing to mention--MediaLab does not actually require the use of Office. In the "old" days, many users embedded Microsoft Word documents in the questionnaires/experiments but as time went on, we started recommending that users save these files as HTML (.htm) files using the Save As command in Word (or by any other method of creating HTML) and then using the HTML item type rather than the Word item type in MediaLab. PowerPoint shows can be linked as executables (see link above). The only requirement for Office to run MediaLab sessions really is Excel *if* you are using the Advanced Features (i.e., via a responses.xls file). We haven't yet heard a single report of trouble using Excel 2007 for the Advanced Features but it may be too early to say. As an aside here, one really nice feature of Excel 2007 is that it gets rid of the old 255 column limitation which allows you to view huge data files in the easy to handle .csv format. If anyone has trouble or success with Office 2007 (or later) please let us know!