New computer has no optical drive, how to load Office 2003

My daughter gave me her old Dell mini-10 a few years back,, You see it had gotten sick and she could not fix it "If you can get it working it's yours" Took me fifteen minutes. But that is a story already told.

It has no optical drive, but they sell an external plug in drive that works great.

IN Fact, all the way back to my 8088 days I had an external CD drive for my computers.. All worked great.

BACK TO OP! (not shouting, just speaking loudly!)

Just do exactly what you suggested in your original post. Copy your Office 2003 CD to any external storage medium you like: a USB thumbdrive, a portable hard drive, or an SD card.

Plug that into your new computer. Open that directory. Toward the end of a long list of files, look for <>. Click on that, and Bob's your uncle. There will be a place to enter the key during the install.

Works for me on an ASUS running Win 8.1 64bit. Ignore all this other rubbish about changing to Open Office, or switching to a newer Office or buying something else. We like our Office 2003, and we're sticking to it!

I copy all my install disks to a hard drive -- you never know when you need it!

Gdetrailer wrote:
...
Older versions were developed by Oracle, that has changed to Apache software. No big deal, at least it is STILL available and being developed. ...

Technically speaking, older versions of OpenOffice were developed by Sun. It became Oracle's property when Oracle acquired Sun. Some of the original development staff of OpenOffice weren't happy with Oracle's handling of OpenOffice so they left the company and formed The Document Foundation and released LibreOffice. Oracle then gave OpenOffice to Apache so it would continue being developed as open source.

Gdetrailer wrote:

More and more Laptops are NOT being offered with optical drives. This is due to several factors..

One is COST, manufacturer cuts off $40 in materials and some time in labor. Helps keep the manufacturer in the black.. Consumer gets a laptop a few bucks cheaper and they feel they got a great deal.

Two is SIZE, everyone wants the smallest and most lightweight PCs so trimming a bit of weight and size helps.

Three, less software is being delivered via physical media, future holds less and less physical delivery and more "cloud" type stuff. This allows the software vendors to track and crack down on piracy issues..

An additional reason is because often the software on physical media is outdated by the time the media gets to the consumer and newer software is available from the mfr's website.

When I purchased a netbook 5 years ago that had no DVD drive, I went right out and bought an external USB drive. For most of the last 5 years it has sat in the cupboard unused.

I personally do not recommend purchasing an external optical drive. If the computers are networked than sharing an optical drive over the network will work or simply copy the install files to a USB thumb drive. The only install disks that aren't readily copied to a thumb drive are OS install disks since they have to be booted from in order to perform an install. Thumb drives can be made bootable but it takes a litte more effort than simply copying the files.

deltamaster wrote:
I recently installed Apache on a machine and it looked like the original but when I opened a document originally written on WORD it did not format properly. As I recall I never had that problem with Open Office.

I use Apache Open Office and it works just fine.

2112 wrote:
My 15" Sony VAIO doesn't have a drive. I wished it was cheap!

I stand corrected. I never knew DVDs to be called optical drives.

tenbear wrote:

deltamaster wrote:
Oh. Forgot to mention that one of my favorite features with Open Office was that it would save the documents in Adobe acrobat (PDF)format

You can install "PDFCreator" and make PDFs in almost any program. It installs as a printer. Its a free program. There are several other similar programs.

My MS Office 2007 & 2010 allows my to save anything as a PDF as well...I think I downloaded an update for 2003 that allowed to save as PDF file type as well.

AS far as the optical drive-I do have a few portables-but the Sony Vaio 17" that I'm typing on right now does have one-not that I would know if its works or not-I know it slides open when I push the little button! ;)

Notice how many more posts a thread like this gets when most of the country is in a deep freeze-kinda funny.

2oldman wrote:
Netbooks, or a presumably cheap laptop.

My 15" Sony VAIO doesn't have a drive. I wished it was cheap!

MitchF150 wrote:
What laptop does not come standard with a writeable DVD drive??

Lots of them. It's getting more and more common these days, although plenty are still available with optical drives - Blu Ray or otherwise.

I second (third, forth?) the motion for an external USB drive. It will come in handy from time to time.

Plenty to choose from here from about 15 bucks on up. Thirty bucks gets one with lots of good reviews.

Gdetrailer wrote:

Open Office STILL EXISTS and is STILL AVAILABLE AS A FREE DOWNLOAD.

Older versions were developed by Oracle, that has changed to Apache software. No big deal, at least it is STILL available and being developed..

You can find the latest Open Office Version

HERE

By the way, this IS the reason I will never "depend" on the cloud or any other Internet software delivery as sole means for retrieving and reloading my software..

Download the software then MAKE A BACKUP COPY on CD, DVD, External HD so you will always have it in the future...

That is the same link I just used a couple days ago to install on a couple of laptops for DW. As I mentioned it does appear to be and function just as did Open Office... just under a new name/company.

I am glad you mentioned "Oracle". I, for the life of me, could not remember that!


I actually prefer Open Office to MS. It is a bit easier to use and it is F R E E !!! Gotta LOVE free!

I created an entire publication for my sister's business with it a few years ago. Included pictures and the works. Turned out really nice and when I saved it as PDF it printed out really nice as well. We were able to take the PDF to Kinkos and make multiple copies without any alteration to the document/book I created since the PDF is adaptable to all printers without altering the document AND it can be set as read only so no one else can alter it either!