Reinstalling MS Office after reformat

[Russ Kidd]

My copy of MS Office 98 is a legal one, but I don't have a disk.  (See below for explanation if you're skeptical.)

I plan to reformat my hard drive, and I will of course back up MS Office beforehand.

My question is:  If I copy MS Office back onto the hard drive after reformat, will it work okay?  Or is there some kind of "install" routine that must be done?  

Explanation for skeptics :  As I mentioned in a TS post a few weeks ago, I received an email a couple of years ago with an MS Word attachment.  I didn't have Word at the time, but I double-clicked on the attachment to see what would happen.  MS Office 98 immediately began downloading to my computer.  I was surprised, but figured maybe it was a Microsoft marketing tool to give out free copies of old versions of Office.  In any case, I wasn't asking questions.  However, Kelly, who replied to my post, had never heard of this.  So I'm assuming this might not happen again and I'd like to preserve my copy of the program if I can.

[kelly]

Still haven't heard of anything like it Russ.

Must have been a gift from Mr. Gates.

You'll need to back up the Application itself.

And all it's parts.

Every Control Panel, Extension and Preference.

After you Reformat and Re-Install stuff, put everything back where it came from.

[krissel]

After you try manually grabbing everything you think belongs to Office 98, copy it onto a separate disk then try using this Office 98 removal utility. It will put the contents into the trash. Not sure how good it is or whether it actually bothers with prefs but it could be a second chance to see if you missed anything the first time around.

If you do reinstall 98 be sure this update is applied which will negate that nasty feature that put a unique identifier into each Word doc.

BTW, they are still selling Office 98...here.

Office 98 came free with some of the earlier G3 desktops as part of the bundled software. A friend of mine gave me hers as she never used it. Too complicated for her.  

[Russ Kidd]

Thanks, Kelly and Krissel.  You both are so helpful to me.  

You might be interested to know that I was just talking to a young attorney here at my office (I'm a word processor at a law firm) about MS Word, Apple and Macintosh.

He was saying he always worked on a Mac in law school and followed very closely Apple's landmark suit against Microsoft for stealing the mouse, desktop, drag-and-drop, point-and-click, etc. technology.  He said several of his law professors said that case was an example of judges who knew very little about computer technology and as a result made a very bad decision that changed the course of history.  I know very little about it, but this attorney said if Apple had won the suit as it should have, the business world would probably all be working on Macs today.

What a shame.

[krissel]

Amen.        

[kelly]

This seems like a reasonable explanation.

"Office 98 came free with some of the earlier G3 desktops as part of the bundled software."