Retrieving Word XP Metadata from a Word 97 document
I am a developer for a company who will be upgrading from Word 97 to
Word XP in the coming months. We are a company of over 1500 employees
with offices in four cities. The rollout process will be gradual (i.e.
maybe 200-300 a month for a few months). Obviously during that time we
will have some user's in the Word 97 environment and some users in a
Word XP environment and what we're trying to prohibit are people who
are still in the 97 environment from opening XP documents, working in
them and saving them back down to Word '97 format. Back and forth,
etc...
The problems that we are encountering is that there doesn't seem to be
an easy way to prevent this. If a '97 user opens an XP document, the
compatibility will show "custom". But "custom" is also set for several
much older word processing documents and we can't use the compatibiliy
therefore, to distinguish between XP and other unknown formats (In our
ideal world, we would like older formats to display a message, "This
document needs to be converted...", XP documents to display a message
like "This is a Word XP document...it is not recommended you work with
it in 97...please contact the author."
We have discovered that in the metadata of a Word document, however,
that it does list the version (8.0 if it's a Word '97 document, 10.0
if it's an XP document). However, we can't seem to 'extract' the
version 10.0 from the metadata when we open an XP document in '97 even
though the XP information (10.0) does appear in the metadata when we
open an XP document in '97. So I guess our question then is, does
anyone have a suggestion for locating (through VBA) that number "10.0"
from the metadata of an XP document opened in Word '97.
The tricky part is that
? ActiveDocument.Application.Version
returns
8.0b
regardless of whether or not the document was created in '97 or XP
when it's opened in '97. But the information (10.0) does exist in the
metadata of an XP document even after it's opened in '97. How can we
take advantage of the metadata to locate that "10.0" information when
it's opened in Word '97? I could be way off with the way I'm trying to
locate that 10.0. Any help would be appreciated.
Bill Bowen
