Hi all,

Moving a new client from Windows 98, Office 2000 & Lotus 123 5.2 to XP and Office 2007.
The trouble is, not all the spreadsheet links work.

It's a small engineering company, and for their technical documents they have some very complex Lotus 123 spreadsheets, which they link to their Word docs and the information is updated directly.
Both the Word and docs and the 123 docs are large, not massively complicated though.

The trouble is only hald the links work.
All these docs are one user's PC whihc I backup to the server. They had no backup at all for 8 years. Yup.
Obviously I moved the documents to thexact same folder, in this case C:\Proyecto\......
Some of the merge data comes through correctly, but some of them say it can't find the data source.
The fields that work use the syntax {LINK 123WORKSHEEET C:\\Proyecto......}
and the ones that don't seem to have the syntax {DDEAUTO 123W C:\\Proyecto.....}

I don't know what the difference is. If we Copy in Lotus and Paste Special in the fields that don't work, the data then works and links and updates correctly.
However they have many different models and sometimes a field is called many times in one Word document and this solution is unfeasible since it will generate hours of Copying Paste Special-ing for every document.

Perhaps the difference is not the LINK or DDEAUTO but the fact that the data source is called 123WORKSHEET or 123W?
I couldn't find the same version of Lotus to install on his new XP box (the old one runs5.2), and could only find Lotus SmartSuite 97, which is a couple of versions newer.

Is there someway of making the data source 123Worksheet have two names? Like a kind of ODBC redirect? Or 'subst' for databases.....?
Or perhaps its the LINK or DDEAUTO issue?

If anyone can help on this topic I'd hugely grateful. He's running two machines in tandem at the moment until we can figure this out which isn't a long term solution....

Here's a screenshot showing the linked data as fields. http://www.willshand.com/screen.png

Google doesn't throw up much info about DDEAUTO or LINK...
Many thanks!
Diz

Two problems:

It is looking at starting a DDE link to the relevant file. DDE was deprecated a decade and a half ago.

And DDE is looking for the registered application Lotus 1-2-3.

I guess you will need to alter all DDE links to be OLE objects and using Excel instead of 1-2-3.?

As an aside, if they are upgrading from 98 now, why to XP and office 2007? XP runs out of support in under 6 months and 2007 was the first attempt at the ribbon interface, which wasn't totally successful. Why not go with Windows 7 or 8 and Office 2010 or 2013? I'd go with Office 2013 in any case, Windows 7 or 8 is a more personal matter.

Aha.
Well, that's good to know.
My next question is: is there any method of getting it to work on Windows XP, with Office 2007?
And somehow getting it to recognise the old data source name as well?
There are many documents, with many links.
And to redo all of each will be many dozens and dozens of hours of work, if not hundreds.

And in answer to your other question: that's the most advanced software that the reconditioned old PCs they just bought will allow.
They prefer old to new, heavens knows why.

Then why not use office 365?

The boss says that's the system they know a little, and they wouldn't be talked out of it.
Customer's always right, no?

No. At least Windows 98 was so old that no modern malware would run on it. They are just landing themselves in the middle of a worse nightmare than they are already in.

Office 2010 shouldn't require more resources than 2007, is actually faster and easier to use.

Yup, I use Office 2010 on XP SP3 at work. 2013 won't run on XP but that's no great loss from what I gather.

Hi all,

Regardless of the Office suite we end up using, is there any way of getting these DDEAUTO links to work on Windows XP with Lotus123 from Lotus Smartsuite 95 ?
That's really the meat and potatoes of what I'm trying to do.
Telling the client that he needs to upgrade his systems is one thing.
Telling his 2 employees that they now have hundreds of hours of editing links is another......

Thanks all,

i believe you can open lotus 123 in open office calc then save them as an Excel or ODF ...

found this ...
http://www.ehow.com/how_8408523_convert ... ffice.html

That doesn't help. Excel can open them as well, but neither support the DDE links and neither register themselves as Lotus in the Registry. That still leaves the users having to edit hundreds or thousands of Word documents.

Have you got access to the original machines and if so could you save the spreadsheets in a friendlier format?

If not, what about installing Windows 98 as a VM, under VirtualBox, then installing Lotus 123 and resaving the files?

I've probably missed something in the conversation but it was worth mentioning...