Installing Office 2003 Over Office XP

I know this sounds like a silly question, but i sthere a "good" or "preferred" way to install Office 2003 OVER an installation of 2002/XP? I have Office XP installed, and I just received a full version of Office 2003 Profesional. I wondered if I have to uninstall Office XP, or just run the install of 2003 and will it overwrite the Office XP stuff? I use Outlook a ton and want to keep my email folders all looking the same, as well as any other settings I may have tweaked without knowing it.
Thanks for any help.

 

You can use the Office2003 CD to install over (upgrade) OfficeXP. It will ask you if you want to keep your current settings, so all your Outlook stuff should be okay. Just be aware if you upgrade... any problems you have in OfficeXP will probably remain. If you are not having any problems with your current installation of Office... things should be fine.

B

 

The upgrade should work just fine. Even the cleanup part of the upgrade install seems to work well. The media content in Office XP will also stay.
The one big problem with 2003 is that MS no longer supply a second, media content CD. The good news is that this CD installs fine in 2003. MS's reasoning is that clip art is readily available on the Internet. I don't need to say why that isn't as convenient as a CD install.

 

All Set

Great, I am all set, the upgrade appears to have worked well. It even synchs with my PPC running Windows 2003 Mobile, but I did have to restart.
Thanks!

 

just an additional side note...

This past weekend I did a fresh install of WindowsXP (slipstreamed w/sp2) on a new hard drive. I installed Office 2003 and opened Outlook to set up my email accounts and Outlook had 3 sets of identical 'personal folders'. I couldn't close or delete any of them (because Outlook said they didn't exist). I tried to repair Office, I uninstalled/reinstalled Office, tried a different partition, and it would either have the 3 sets of folders or NO folders at all. I tried everything I could think of. I finally installed OfficeXP (and it installed correctly) and then upgraded OfficeXP to Office2003 and everything is fine.
I think I'll have to do the same thing with Frontpage because it couldn't find a file (.dll) and wouldn't complete installation. I think both of these problems were caused by SP2. I find it humorous that the only problems I've had with SP2 were with Microsoft products.
Glad you got your Office install taken care of.

B