A change in the migration behavior of the New Office Document and Open Office Document shortcuts is causing problems for some users upgrading to Microsoft Office 2003 Editions from Microsoft Office 97, Office 2000, or Office XP.

 Note    As part of a planned change to the feature set of current and future versions of Office, Microsoft has phased out the Office shortcut bar.

Some users who select the New Office Document shortcut after Microsoft Office 2003 is installed might discover empty template tabs in the New Office Document dialog. This occurs when an Office 2003 Edition (such as Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003) is installed over a previous release of Office that includes Microsoft FrontPage®, or is deployed in stages where a mix of previous Office applications is not removed from users’ computers.

If Office 2003 has been deployed, you may also receive complaints about older Office shortcuts missing from users’ desktops. The Office 2003 installation automatically removes shortcuts for older versions of Office from users’ computers. To avoid this behavior, rename the shortcuts before installation or copy them to a different folder on users’ computers.

Understanding the problem

The Office shortcut bar (also referred to as the Office shortcut menu) was installed to users’ computers by default in previous releases of Office, at which time the New Office Document and Open Office Document menu options were copied to the Windows All Programs menu. The shortcut bar is no longer included in the latest version of Office, which causes a problem when previous installations of Office (or Office applications) cohabitate with Office 2003.

For instance, because Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 is a stand-alone application and is not included in the core Office 2003 Editions (such as Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003), Office 2003 Setup does not by default delete previous versions of FrontPage or its shared components — including the components (OSA.exe) for the old shortcut bar — when Office is installed. But because templates for prior Office applications are deleted during an Office 2003 installation, users can encounter an empty template tab in the New Office Document dialog.

Avoiding or fixing the problem

The problem described in the previous section can be avoided before deployment by using the Custom Installation Wizard, or can be fixed after deployment by using the Custom Maintenance Wizard. Both of these wizards are included in the Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit which is available as a download (ork.exe). You can find this downloadable file on the Office 2003 Resource Kit Downloads page.

Administrators deploying Office 2003 Editions into a mixed-version environment or in a staged fashion should set the New and Open Office Document Shortcuts feature to Run from my computer (found in the Office Shared Features node of the Set Feature Installation States page of the Custom Installation Wizard). Administrators whose users are currently experiencing the problem can fix it by making the same settings in the Custom Maintenance Wizard, if Office was deployed with a custom transform.

Another option for avoiding this situation is to remove all previous installations of Office, stand-alone versions of Office applications, and all shared components from the target computer before installing Office 2003. This creates a clean installation environment for the new version of Office. To remove all prior installations of Office from a computer, you use either the Remove Previous Versions page of the Custom Installation Wizard when you create a custom transform, or use the Office Removal Wizard before installing Office 2003.

If you do not want users to have access to the old New and Open Office Document Shortcut feature of the previous release of Office, delete the old shortcuts from the All Programs menu and the symptoms of this issue will stop. However, the shared components of that previous release of Office will still be installed on the user’s computer, which may not be a desired condition.

 Note    Optionally, if Office 2003 is installed using the Complete installation option the New and Open Office Document Shortcut feature is installed by default and the issue is avoided.