8 ms·

I recently used Wine to run Office 97 on Debian, just for old time's sake. I ended up liking it so much that I now use it for my word processing and spreadshee

I recently used Wine to run Office 97 on Debian, just for old time's sake. I ended up liking it so much that I now use it for my word processing and spreadsheet tasks. This classic version is feature complete to me. Wine ensures it lives on, long past its support date and on an alien operating system. And clippit says hello! Screenshot for the curious: https://imgur.com/a/GmVUAfC https://imgur.com/a/GmVUAfC It shows Word 97 on Linux editing a lengthy docx converted by LibreOffice. Images, text boxes and arrows all came back to 1997 unscathed.

mongol 5y ago
How well does it run?
- HeckFeck 5y ago
  Excel, Word and PowerPoint run as well as they did on Windows. All the main functionality is very stable. Wine even integrated the icons and mime-types into my DE. It is only very occasionally I hit any critical error. It has only happened when trying something obscure, like "Microsoft Maps for Excel". I haven't tried Outlook 97 yet. But poor old Access won't even get off the ground. I'm guessing due to some ODBC driver too stodgy to have a sip of Wine.
  - mongol 5y ago
    Interesting. My main use case for using Word would be for my CV. Since I don't want it to render a single bit different than on a recruiting manager's screen. Unfortunately PDF still seems to be a bit of a disadvantage in some cases.
    - HeckFeck 5y ago
      If you install modern fonts and get busy with the drawing tools, you can produce a modern styled CV. I would say the chances are good if you made a modern one and saved it as a .doc it would open identically in modern Word. (Though, I have already some ideas for a blog post on this, I might try this scenario too and see what modern Word makes of it!) I actually used Word 97 to write a report for university. I switched Arial for Calibri and they were none the wiser.
    - lucb1e 5y ago
      I have never heard anyone have problems with a PDF CV. If that's a disqualification reason... I don't know. This is speaking of IT of course; if you are talking to a small business doing woodworking or whatever, all bets are off on what tech they can and cannot handle. I'd still bet on PDF more than doc(x), though, since maybe they don't have an expensive Word license but PDF should render in browsers.
      - mongol 5y ago
        It is actually not for employment, but as I work as consultant / contractor I have these agencies between me and possible customers. They enjoy to edit out any contact information from CVs to act as middlemen. It sucks but does not reflect on the actual assignment in the end.
        lucb1e 5y ago
        Oh, okay yeah if they want to make edits, then giving them rendered output is indeed not the nice thing to do.
      - fragmede 5y ago
        There are still corners of the world where docx is the One True Format, and PDFs make you seem like the weirdo. I can easily imagine it being too different/difficult and a candidate being rejected from the enormous pile for that. The Internet has made it far more common to get outsized responses; eg 800 applicants for 3 positions, with no easy way to sort through them all.
    - gnulinux 5y ago
      This doesn't quite make sense to me. Sending your Resume in .docx is kind of a terrible idea, and I've seen countless people running mainstream Windows version getting bitten by this. On top this, in my experience it's *much* easier for me as an interviewer to review your resume in PDF rather than docx (even if I have access to MS Word or Google Docs). I have never seen any company or recruiter (in the US) who prefers docx but I've seen multiple companies (including my own) that prefer PDF. So, someone going out of their way to type their resume in wine word, only for it to be a scrambled mess... I would strongly recommend you not to do this. If you're emailing your resume and you absolutely want to go ahead with your plan, please consider adding both the pdf and docx. Good luck!
      - mongol 5y ago
        It is actually not for employment, but as I work as consultant / contractor I have these agencies between me and possible customers. They enjoy to edit out any contact information from CVs to act as middlemen. It sucks but does not reflect on the actual assignment in the end. The idea to send it in both versions is actually very good. Thank you!
        gnulinux 5y ago
        Ah I see. Never worked as a consultant/contractor so I wouldn't know!
  - stuartd 5y ago
    Outlook 97 was the last decent version (and I think the last version to fully support Lookout, whose ability to index public folders before people thought ACLs were necessary resulted in some interesting discoveries). Then again I have (reasonably) positive memories of MS-Mail. The version of desktop Outlook I have to use (2016?) is a horrible buggy mess.
nudpiedo 5y ago
So interesting… does it work well with modern word documents? I don’t expect it to run docx but somehow I think it might be better than open office in some aspects
- HeckFeck 5y ago
  It fares quite well, actually. Here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/GmVUAfC https://imgur.com/a/GmVUAfC I converted my dissertation from Docx to Doc using LibreOffice Writer. It opened in Word 97 almost identically (some page breaks notwithstanding). In my dissertation I had a screenshot with some text boxes and arrows floating over it. Good old Word 97 rendered it perfectly, position, formatting, the works. To complete the picture, after opening my dissertation, Clippit looks suitably bored. And on Office97 running Docx, funny you mention that. While there is no official way, there are those in this thread who have got the MS FileFormatConverters to work: https://msfn.org/board/topic/133124-ms-office-2007-compatibility-pack-with-office-97/ https://msfn.org/board/topic/133124-ms-office-2007-compatibi... When I have a spare weekend, I'm going to try this in my Wine'd setup and see how far I get. The results will become a blog post.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > I converted my dissertation from Docx to Doc using LibreOffice Writer. It opened in Word 97 almost identically (some page breaks notwithstanding). In my dissertation I had a screenshot with some text boxes and arrows floating over it. Good old Word 97 rendered it perfectly, position, formatting, the works. To complete the picture, after opening my dissertation, Clippit looks suitably bored. I bet if you used Office to convert Docx to Doc, Word 97 would import it without problems. LibreOffice seems to make lossy conversions between formats.
ogogmad 5y ago
What modern MS Office features are missing from '97 but still useful? I'm thinking you won't be able to write formulas using Latex. There's also a 32-bit limit for the amount of memory a program can use.
- tagoregrtst 5y ago
  I think the worst would be .doc extensions instead of .docx Other than that, give me WP5.1 baby
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    IMO, .doc might be the second worst format ever invented (second to PDF). It is a proprietary, binary only format for storing text documents. Who thought that was a good idea?
    - idiot900 5y ago
      It's an artifact of a time when RAM was extremely expensive and CPUs were slow. Dumping the in-memory binary representation to a disk was apparently the logical choice at the time.
      - Taywee 5y ago
        Too bad SQLite didn't exist at the time. It would be a pretty good candidate for something like that without eating bogs of memory for large documents. To be fair to the Office team of the day, when your company also develops the compiler and can guarantee the safety of writing and loading raw structures under specific constraints (even in ways that violate programming language standards), it's not too bad of an idea. Not that it's the greatest, as even then there were certainly better ways of doing it, but the landscape of serialization wasn't as nice as it is now.
        p_l 5y ago
        SQLite would not be a good choice. DOC file format, combined with OLE containers, was designed at least partly to deal with common practice of keeping documents on floppies, and to make saving documents as speedy as possible. This meant a combination of pseudo filesystem (OLE containers can be summarised as a variation of FAT filesystem) and blittable data structures. This way when you saved an updated version of the document, Word would only extend the file with new changes, minimizing amount of I/O necessary. Another aspect to this was that DOC was not supposed to be interchange file format - that's a role that was supposed to belong to RTF. Which was much easier to parse and had formal, published specification instead of memory dumps of internal data structures. However it took a more resources to update such file, so RTF and DOC were kept in sync when it came to capabilities all the way to Office 2003 - everything you could do in DOC, you could do in RTF, and vice-versa. Of course, practice quickly went in different direction and most people only think of RTF as the simpler sibling of DOC, because WordPad on Windows used it.
csdvrx 5y ago
Same, but with Office 2007. I'm getting ready to upgrade to Office 2010 mostly for 64 bit support. Any suggestion to run it best on wine64? Alternatively, how to migrate an old wine32 bottle to wine7 amd64?
haunter 5y ago
I do the same with Office 2003! There is even a compability pack for docx/xlsx files so it's really good Edit: If anyone needs it. Looks like MS removed the original download but still available from CNET https://download.cnet.com/Microsoft-Office-Compatibility-Pack-for-Word-Excel-and-PowerPoint-File-Formats/3000-18483_4-10648733.html https://download.cnet.com/Microsoft-Office-Compatibility-Pac...
kilroy123 5y ago
I thought its name was clippy?
- Lammy 5y ago
  Not officially, but "Clippy" is way more common https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    It's amazing to think that the technology behind Clippy is the foundation for all of Microsoft's AI and ML work. I mean it probably isn't, but it's still amazing to think it.
    - rzzzt 5y ago
      Merlin, the puppy and the kitten in Office were based on Microsoft Agent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent
    - hulitu 5y ago
      Yes it is. It was the first crap feature enabled by default using dark patterns when you try to disable it.
- HeckFeck 5y ago
  His public persona, yes. We're close enough that I'm permitted to use his real name.
xd1936 5y ago
My IT department still uses a home-grown work ticketing system built in Access 97. The leadership in the department built it custom to their wants in the 90s and, just like you, it's feature-complete-ish. Pain in the butt for newer employees like me. Please don't tell them that it works in Wine. It needs to die.
- ByThyGrace 5y ago
  But then all computers in your company can now move to Linux! Surely they'll love it when you pitch this news to them.
Legion 5y ago
I've never thought to try this. Now I have to try this.
- HeckFeck 5y ago
  You're welcome to join! Installation requires the 32 bit Wine runtime, which will require pulling in your distro's 32 bit libs. After that set export WINEARCH="win32" in your env, just run setup and all is golden. It is worth noting that Office 97 + all deps required for 32 bit Wine is still a smaller installation size than any recent Office.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    Interestingly, this announcement makes it sound like you might not even need 32-bit libraries anymore: - The 64-bit Windows-on-Windows (WoW64) architecture is implemented, and supports running a 32-bit Windows application inside a 64-bit Unix host process, using thunks to map 32-bit NT system calls to the 64-bit NTDLL. - WoW64 thunks are implemented for most Unix libraries, enabling a 32-bit PE module to call a 64-bit Unix library. Once the remaining modules are converted to PE, this will make it possible to run 32-bit applications without installing 32-bit Unix libraries.
    - vetinari 5y ago
      I wonder how that will work on M1 macs. Right now, trying to run any 32-bit executable with Wine 6 is being met with "bad CPU type in executable".
      - my123 5y ago
        CrossOver’s Wine builds have wine32on64 to run x86_32 programs using Rosetta 2 on M1 macs. Available at https://github.com/Gcenx/homebrew-wine https://github.com/Gcenx/homebrew-wine if you want to use a free build for example.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Soon you'll write code under DOS Turbo Pascal 5.5
yyyk 5y ago
An interesting question: which Office version is the best assuming one does not want a modern version with the ribbon interface (so 2007+ is out)? Looking at wikipedia new feature list, most features following 97 aren't very compelling for a single user: "HTML support"? "Collaboration features"? "Customized XML schemas"? Meh. However, Office XP IMHO has a few minor improvements (minor UI refresh, print preview in PowerPoint, bulleted lists in Word, better password protection in general and docx/xlsx support via the Open XML Compatibility Pack though that's common for every version from Office 2000 to 2003) that make it worthwhile over 97.
- p_l 5y ago
  2003 is best option for you then - it also contains the last classic office file format implementations, so highest chances you can convert files with minimal hassle from newer versions.
- todorov84 5y ago
  I think you should go with Office 2010 even though you dislike the ribbon. Office 2003 is a delight to use, but any version prior to 2007 will lack support by default to docx, xlsx and pptx formats, which are the current file formats and the ones someone would share with you in the "real world". Using an older version, even if you install the compatibility pack as someone suggested in another comment, you will experience many issues -- especially in Excel, which was heavily modified (e.g. rows increased from 2^16 to 2^20, new color model replacing the old palette of 16 user-defined colors, new functions such as SUMIFS and COUNTIFS, new implementations for sorting, filtering, conditional formatting etc). Excel 2010 is almost like 2007, but with many tweaks, corrected statistical functions (they were notoriously unreliable in previous versions) and with improvements to charts which are still almost 100% compatible with the latest version. You should have no problems at all creating and editing documents between Excel 2010 and the most recent version in either direction. Being an older version of Office, it's also very responsive even on low-end machines -- just be sure to install the 64 bits version. As for the ribbon, remember that you can double click any tab (for instance, "Data") to automatically hide the menu. You can also customize each and every button on it (right button, "Customize the ribbon").
ByThyGrace 5y ago
How do you even get a legit copy of Office 97 these days?
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  eBay, Craigslist, etc.
- account42 5y ago
  Independent of copyright term reductions, I think you really should have to continue to activiely distribute something in order to retain copyright. Abandonware should be equivalent with public domain.

mongol 5y ago

How well does it run?

HeckFeck 5y ago
Excel, Word and PowerPoint run as well as they did on Windows. All the main functionality is very stable. Wine even integrated the icons and mime-types into my DE. It is only very occasionally I hit any critical error. It has only happened when trying something obscure, like "Microsoft Maps for Excel". I haven't tried Outlook 97 yet. But poor old Access won't even get off the ground. I'm guessing due to some ODBC driver too stodgy to have a sip of Wine.
- mongol 5y ago
  Interesting. My main use case for using Word would be for my CV. Since I don't want it to render a single bit different than on a recruiting manager's screen. Unfortunately PDF still seems to be a bit of a disadvantage in some cases.
  - HeckFeck 5y ago
    If you install modern fonts and get busy with the drawing tools, you can produce a modern styled CV. I would say the chances are good if you made a modern one and saved it as a .doc it would open identically in modern Word. (Though, I have already some ideas for a blog post on this, I might try this scenario too and see what modern Word makes of it!) I actually used Word 97 to write a report for university. I switched Arial for Calibri and they were none the wiser.
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    I have never heard anyone have problems with a PDF CV. If that's a disqualification reason... I don't know. This is speaking of IT of course; if you are talking to a small business doing woodworking or whatever, all bets are off on what tech they can and cannot handle. I'd still bet on PDF more than doc(x), though, since maybe they don't have an expensive Word license but PDF should render in browsers.
    - mongol 5y ago
      It is actually not for employment, but as I work as consultant / contractor I have these agencies between me and possible customers. They enjoy to edit out any contact information from CVs to act as middlemen. It sucks but does not reflect on the actual assignment in the end.
      - lucb1e 5y ago
        Oh, okay yeah if they want to make edits, then giving them rendered output is indeed not the nice thing to do.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      There are still corners of the world where docx is the One True Format, and PDFs make you seem like the weirdo. I can easily imagine it being too different/difficult and a candidate being rejected from the enormous pile for that. The Internet has made it far more common to get outsized responses; eg 800 applicants for 3 positions, with no easy way to sort through them all.
  - gnulinux 5y ago
    This doesn't quite make sense to me. Sending your Resume in .docx is kind of a terrible idea, and I've seen countless people running mainstream Windows version getting bitten by this. On top this, in my experience it's *much* easier for me as an interviewer to review your resume in PDF rather than docx (even if I have access to MS Word or Google Docs). I have never seen any company or recruiter (in the US) who prefers docx but I've seen multiple companies (including my own) that prefer PDF. So, someone going out of their way to type their resume in wine word, only for it to be a scrambled mess... I would strongly recommend you not to do this. If you're emailing your resume and you absolutely want to go ahead with your plan, please consider adding both the pdf and docx. Good luck!
    - mongol 5y ago
      It is actually not for employment, but as I work as consultant / contractor I have these agencies between me and possible customers. They enjoy to edit out any contact information from CVs to act as middlemen. It sucks but does not reflect on the actual assignment in the end. The idea to send it in both versions is actually very good. Thank you!
      - gnulinux 5y ago
        Ah I see. Never worked as a consultant/contractor so I wouldn't know!
- stuartd 5y ago
  Outlook 97 was the last decent version (and I think the last version to fully support Lookout, whose ability to index public folders before people thought ACLs were necessary resulted in some interesting discoveries). Then again I have (reasonably) positive memories of MS-Mail. The version of desktop Outlook I have to use (2016?) is a horrible buggy mess.

nudpiedo 5y ago

So interesting… does it work well with modern word documents? I don’t expect it to run docx but somehow I think it might be better than open office in some aspects

HeckFeck 5y ago
It fares quite well, actually. Here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/GmVUAfC https://imgur.com/a/GmVUAfC I converted my dissertation from Docx to Doc using LibreOffice Writer. It opened in Word 97 almost identically (some page breaks notwithstanding). In my dissertation I had a screenshot with some text boxes and arrows floating over it. Good old Word 97 rendered it perfectly, position, formatting, the works. To complete the picture, after opening my dissertation, Clippit looks suitably bored. And on Office97 running Docx, funny you mention that. While there is no official way, there are those in this thread who have got the MS FileFormatConverters to work: https://msfn.org/board/topic/133124-ms-office-2007-compatibility-pack-with-office-97/ https://msfn.org/board/topic/133124-ms-office-2007-compatibi... When I have a spare weekend, I'm going to try this in my Wine'd setup and see how far I get. The results will become a blog post.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > I converted my dissertation from Docx to Doc using LibreOffice Writer. It opened in Word 97 almost identically (some page breaks notwithstanding). In my dissertation I had a screenshot with some text boxes and arrows floating over it. Good old Word 97 rendered it perfectly, position, formatting, the works. To complete the picture, after opening my dissertation, Clippit looks suitably bored. I bet if you used Office to convert Docx to Doc, Word 97 would import it without problems. LibreOffice seems to make lossy conversions between formats.

ogogmad 5y ago

What modern MS Office features are missing from '97 but still useful? I'm thinking you won't be able to write formulas using Latex. There's also a 32-bit limit for the amount of memory a program can use.

tagoregrtst 5y ago
I think the worst would be .doc extensions instead of .docx Other than that, give me WP5.1 baby
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  IMO, .doc might be the second worst format ever invented (second to PDF). It is a proprietary, binary only format for storing text documents. Who thought that was a good idea?
  - idiot900 5y ago
    It's an artifact of a time when RAM was extremely expensive and CPUs were slow. Dumping the in-memory binary representation to a disk was apparently the logical choice at the time.
    - Taywee 5y ago
      Too bad SQLite didn't exist at the time. It would be a pretty good candidate for something like that without eating bogs of memory for large documents. To be fair to the Office team of the day, when your company also develops the compiler and can guarantee the safety of writing and loading raw structures under specific constraints (even in ways that violate programming language standards), it's not too bad of an idea. Not that it's the greatest, as even then there were certainly better ways of doing it, but the landscape of serialization wasn't as nice as it is now.
      - p_l 5y ago
        SQLite would not be a good choice. DOC file format, combined with OLE containers, was designed at least partly to deal with common practice of keeping documents on floppies, and to make saving documents as speedy as possible. This meant a combination of pseudo filesystem (OLE containers can be summarised as a variation of FAT filesystem) and blittable data structures. This way when you saved an updated version of the document, Word would only extend the file with new changes, minimizing amount of I/O necessary. Another aspect to this was that DOC was not supposed to be interchange file format - that's a role that was supposed to belong to RTF. Which was much easier to parse and had formal, published specification instead of memory dumps of internal data structures. However it took a more resources to update such file, so RTF and DOC were kept in sync when it came to capabilities all the way to Office 2003 - everything you could do in DOC, you could do in RTF, and vice-versa. Of course, practice quickly went in different direction and most people only think of RTF as the simpler sibling of DOC, because WordPad on Windows used it.

csdvrx 5y ago

Same, but with Office 2007. I'm getting ready to upgrade to Office 2010 mostly for 64 bit support. Any suggestion to run it best on wine64? Alternatively, how to migrate an old wine32 bottle to wine7 amd64?

haunter 5y ago

I do the same with Office 2003! There is even a compability pack for docx/xlsx files so it's really good Edit: If anyone needs it. Looks like MS removed the original download but still available from CNET https://download.cnet.com/Microsoft-Office-Compatibility-Pack-for-Word-Excel-and-PowerPoint-File-Formats/3000-18483_4-10648733.html https://download.cnet.com/Microsoft-Office-Compatibility-Pac...

kilroy123 5y ago

I thought its name was clippy?

Lammy 5y ago
Not officially, but "Clippy" is way more common https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  It's amazing to think that the technology behind Clippy is the foundation for all of Microsoft's AI and ML work. I mean it probably isn't, but it's still amazing to think it.
  - rzzzt 5y ago
    Merlin, the puppy and the kitten in Office were based on Microsoft Agent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent
  - hulitu 5y ago
    Yes it is. It was the first crap feature enabled by default using dark patterns when you try to disable it.
HeckFeck 5y ago
His public persona, yes. We're close enough that I'm permitted to use his real name.

xd1936 5y ago

My IT department still uses a home-grown work ticketing system built in Access 97. The leadership in the department built it custom to their wants in the 90s and, just like you, it's feature-complete-ish. Pain in the butt for newer employees like me. Please don't tell them that it works in Wine. It needs to die.

ByThyGrace 5y ago
But then all computers in your company can now move to Linux! Surely they'll love it when you pitch this news to them.

Legion 5y ago

I've never thought to try this. Now I have to try this.

HeckFeck 5y ago
You're welcome to join! Installation requires the 32 bit Wine runtime, which will require pulling in your distro's 32 bit libs. After that set export WINEARCH="win32" in your env, just run setup and all is golden. It is worth noting that Office 97 + all deps required for 32 bit Wine is still a smaller installation size than any recent Office.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Interestingly, this announcement makes it sound like you might not even need 32-bit libraries anymore: - The 64-bit Windows-on-Windows (WoW64) architecture is implemented, and supports running a 32-bit Windows application inside a 64-bit Unix host process, using thunks to map 32-bit NT system calls to the 64-bit NTDLL. - WoW64 thunks are implemented for most Unix libraries, enabling a 32-bit PE module to call a 64-bit Unix library. Once the remaining modules are converted to PE, this will make it possible to run 32-bit applications without installing 32-bit Unix libraries.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    I wonder how that will work on M1 macs. Right now, trying to run any 32-bit executable with Wine 6 is being met with "bad CPU type in executable".
    - my123 5y ago
      CrossOver’s Wine builds have wine32on64 to run x86_32 programs using Rosetta 2 on M1 macs. Available at https://github.com/Gcenx/homebrew-wine https://github.com/Gcenx/homebrew-wine if you want to use a free build for example.
agumonkey 5y ago
Soon you'll write code under DOS Turbo Pascal 5.5

yyyk 5y ago

An interesting question: which Office version is the best assuming one does not want a modern version with the ribbon interface (so 2007+ is out)? Looking at wikipedia new feature list, most features following 97 aren't very compelling for a single user: "HTML support"? "Collaboration features"? "Customized XML schemas"? Meh. However, Office XP IMHO has a few minor improvements (minor UI refresh, print preview in PowerPoint, bulleted lists in Word, better password protection in general and docx/xlsx support via the Open XML Compatibility Pack though that's common for every version from Office 2000 to 2003) that make it worthwhile over 97.

p_l 5y ago
2003 is best option for you then - it also contains the last classic office file format implementations, so highest chances you can convert files with minimal hassle from newer versions.
todorov84 5y ago
I think you should go with Office 2010 even though you dislike the ribbon. Office 2003 is a delight to use, but any version prior to 2007 will lack support by default to docx, xlsx and pptx formats, which are the current file formats and the ones someone would share with you in the "real world". Using an older version, even if you install the compatibility pack as someone suggested in another comment, you will experience many issues -- especially in Excel, which was heavily modified (e.g. rows increased from 2^16 to 2^20, new color model replacing the old palette of 16 user-defined colors, new functions such as SUMIFS and COUNTIFS, new implementations for sorting, filtering, conditional formatting etc). Excel 2010 is almost like 2007, but with many tweaks, corrected statistical functions (they were notoriously unreliable in previous versions) and with improvements to charts which are still almost 100% compatible with the latest version. You should have no problems at all creating and editing documents between Excel 2010 and the most recent version in either direction. Being an older version of Office, it's also very responsive even on low-end machines -- just be sure to install the 64 bits version. As for the ribbon, remember that you can double click any tab (for instance, "Data") to automatically hide the menu. You can also customize each and every button on it (right button, "Customize the ribbon").

ByThyGrace 5y ago

How do you even get a legit copy of Office 97 these days?

gattilorenz 5y ago
eBay, Craigslist, etc.
account42 5y ago
Independent of copyright term reductions, I think you really should have to continue to activiely distribute something in order to retain copyright. Abandonware should be equivalent with public domain.