MS Office files won't open directly when double-clicked in OS 9

Question

Hi, all.
On an upgraded Lombard, I have full legal versions of both MS Office 2001 on OS 9.2.2 and Office 2004 on OS X Panther 10.3.9. Opening Office files from within OS X works fine.
However, when booting into OS 9, I can't double-click to open any Office 2001 documents directly. What seems to happen is that Finder first locates the Office 2004 apps and then tells me that I need Mac OS X to be able to run those versions. I can drag the documents onto aliases of the appropriate Office applications, but that seems tedious. I haven't tried opening the files by starting Office 2001 from within OS X, because I have both native versions. Concerning possible application/extension conflicts, these are fresh installs of OS 9, OS X, and Office 2001 and 2004 (in that order) on a newly formatted hard drive.
What I've tried: I've fiddled with the File Exchange and Internet (Advanced tab) Control Panels, as well as downloading and configuring MuchoFileInfo, all to no avail. Going with my "finding one copy of Office first" theory (since in both versions each application is identically named and in nearly identical folder paths), I tried renaming the enclosing folders, hoping that re-alphabetizing would influence the search order. Still no luck. And of course I've tried resetting the PMU, zapping the PRAM, and rebuilding the Desktop. Of all these attempts, the only change I saw was that--after installing MuchoFileInfo--the documents properly displayed their Office 2001 icons, whereas before they only showed up as blank icons.
The closest thread I saw to my problem was archived as unanswered. (http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=1434134&tstart=0)
Is there any way to get Finder 9 to recognize the files as what they are? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hi, bobinski -
Is it better to keep them separate (for more reasons than this current problem)?
Some folk believe so. Reasons can include facilitating the re-install either OS, if needed, or to wipe just one away; and using disk repair utilities of various kinds and capabilities. One other effect resulting from partitioning - since each OS will be able to look in a smaller volume for a file it seeks, rather than looking in the entire drive, both OS's should run a bit snappier on a partitioned drive.
As far as how big each partition should be, well, that depends a bit on what use you put the machine to, how large the programs and the files you create with them are, etc.
In general, since OSX 10.3 and 10.4 do best when given 5GB of free space to use, allowing a minimum of about 8GB just for OSX is one figure; adding in additional space for programs and files depends upon what you have.
OS 9 does not need as much space - the OS itself needs less than 0.5GB, and its programs are probably smaller.
Given a hard drive size of 20GB, I would project a partitioning scheme of about 12 to 15GB for OSX, the rest for OS 9.
The first partition (the topmost one in the formatting utility's schematic) will be the fastest one. Which one that should be is your call, based on which you consider to be your prime OS now, and which you expect it will be in the future of that machine. It may not make any real difference, compared to similar effects between the first and last partitions on a multi-partition 120GB drive.
You can use either OS 9's Drive Setup or OSX's Disk Utility to do the partitioning. Some comments -
• If you use OSX's Disk Utility, as Denis stated be sure to select the option to install OS 9 drivers.
• Select Mac OS Extended as the format.
• Partitioning an unpartitioned drive will erase everything on it, so before proceeding with partitioning be sure you have backed up anything you do not want to lose.