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Bulk convert Word Excel 2003 documents to Office 2007

Posted on September 11, 2008 at 5:22 am

Do you have a bunch of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents that you need to convert from Office 2003 to Office 2007? Looking for an Office 2003 to 2007 file converter? I recently had to do this as my company moved from Office 2003 to the new Office 2007 format. Instead of opening each file individually and saving it in the new format or using an online file conversion tool, there’s a cool program that will bulk convert your Office 2003 files to Office 2007 format.

Migration Manager is a free tool from Microsoft that was designed for administrators to work with Office 2007 files. However, anyone can use it if you can follow the directions below. There are some commands you have to type into the command prompt, but it’s very straight forward.

First download the tool and extract it to a folder on your hard drive, i.e. C:\Convert. Next download and install the Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

Now go to the C:\Convert\Tools directory and open the ofc.ini file in Notepad.

Add the following line to the bottom of the INI file:

fldr=C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents

The path that you enter above will be the path that the program will look into for all of the files you want to convert to Office 2007. You can also enter a server share if you have documents stored on the network:

fldr=\\server\share\docs

By default, the program will go through the directory and all sub-directories and convert all Word files (doc to docx), Excel files (xls to xlsx), Powerpoint files (ppt to pptx), Access databases, MS Project files, and Visio diagrams.

In order to run the program, you have to open the command prompt, Start – Run – type in CMD, and navigate to c:\convert\tools\. You can do this by typing in CD C:\convert\tools or whatever your path is.

Now type in the command ofc.exe and press Enter. The program will automatically begin converting the old Office XP and 2003 files to Office 2007 and give you a summary report at the end.

If you have other documents in the folders that are already in Office 2007 format or that are PDF’s, etc, don’t worry, the program will just skip over that files and not convert it.

It took me a minute to figure out where the converted files were stored, but I finally found them at

C:\Documents and Settings\akishore\Converted\ORIGINAL_PATH_NAME

Note that your original files are not touched or modified in any way, so you can rest assured that your files will not be damaged or lost in the conversion process. Overall, it’s a simple and fast way to convert many Word 2003, Excel 2003 and Powerpoint 2003 files to Office 2007 format. Enjoy!

You may also be interested in some of my other posts including how to convert Powerpoint presentations to DVD, Flash, or PDF and how to convert a PDF to Word, JPG, or Excel format. Source: DigitalInspiration

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5 Responses to “Bulk convert Word Excel 2003 documents to Office 2007”

rvinno said on : September 11th, 2008 at 9:33 am

Thanks! I’ve been searching for this for months now… I think I came across this method before but it “looks” complicated, but when I saw this post on your site, I know that you would be able to make it simpler, and I was right..

Keep this up, I always check your site day and night!

rvinno said on : September 11th, 2008 at 10:05 am

I’m sorry I think I spoke to soon..

I have my My Documents folder on a different drive.. drive H: to be exact, so I placed there on the last line of the ofc.ini file, fldr=H:\My Documents

then I’m sure I followed EVERY step, but when I typed ofc.exe at the command prompt, the program ran but apparently it didn’t convert any documents according to the summary…

akishore said on : September 11th, 2008 at 10:08 am

rvinno, I think I figured out the problem…actually don’t add the line to the bottom of the file. That line is already in the file towards the top (two of them actually as examples), but they are commented out with a “;”. Go ahead and change the one that starts with c:\documents and settings to h:\my documents and then remove the “;” at the front of the line!

I will update my post also…adding the line at the end for some reason does not work. Thanks for notifying me!

rvinno said on : September 11th, 2008 at 10:19 am

There! It worked! Thanks a lot again..

RECX said on : October 14th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

Hi Kishore,

I have small question on this co nversion process.

If the Previous version (2003 Excel) has some Activex Used in its VBA / Macro. During the Conversion process will get converted automoaticaly or it will be removed from the new / conveted version of the file (2007 excel)?

Thanks and Regards
RECX