We inherited an old iMac G4 that had MS Office 2008 (version 12.x) for Mac in it under OS X 10.4.11. Since I know MS Office 2008 will be sluggish for this iMac, and we wanted to use our own copy of MS Office for Mac (2004, version 11.5), I installed this old version in the iMac. What happened next was not something I foresaw: whenever I double click word, excel and ppoint files, it still always defaults to the MS Office 2008 programs. I did 3 things to try to solve it: 1. used Open With, chose the corresponding MS Office 2004 app, then clicked ALWAYS OPEN WITH this app for this file. This works but only for that particular file. 2. used Get Info, then under Open With, chose Office 2004 (version 11), checked CHANGE ALL for all similar file types. --> Fail. All files still defaulted to MS Office 2008 (version 12). (this seems to be an OS X bug!) 3. dragged the whole MS Office 2008 to the TRASH. --> Fail. All files now default to ERROR message. What should we do so all MS Office files will default to MS Office 2004 apps? 1. use the Original MS Office 2008 installer to uninstall MS Office 2008? (don't have this installer DVD, inherited this Office 2008 with the iMac) Will the Error message go away? 2. uninstall both MS Office 2008 and 2004 even by just dragging both to the TRASH, and then reinstall MS Office 2004? 3. what else? Help!
Sounds like Option 2 will work for you. However, I'd like to suggest that you use AppZapper (at least on demo mode) to nuke all the files related to Office (plist, pkg etc) lurking in your libraries. Then start anew with a fresh install of 2004.
