Sue,
Thanks for your suggestions. When I get my new laptop in a couple of days, I
guess I'll have to install Office 2003 Professional anyway. There will be no
other way to open that .pst file unless I download Outlook's Beta2
immediately. In addition, I may not participate in the full Office Beta2,
that is, I might wait to do the Word or Excel pieces until later in the
summer.

Will adopting Beta2 piecemeal cause other issues I will want to avoid,
though? Word ties into OneNote and Outlook pretty tightly... My goal for use
of Beta2 is learning the interoperability of Outlook and OneNote during the
coming school year (I teach.) I didn't use Outlook or OneNote this last year
so I have to put together some structure before school starts in the second
half of July.

There is one other consideration: When the Beta is over I will have to buy
the Office2007 suite and need the 2003 code on the laptop to take advantage
of my right to "upgrade" as opposed to flat-out purchase of the full
Professional configuration. (I know there are new names for the product sets
and SKUs.) This would be a huge savings.

So, will the Office2003 code still linger for the upgrade if I do adopt the
full Beta2? Should I do the full Beta2 and all the release candidates, then
uninstall all that, install 2003 just before upgrade? That could cause a big
file mess on my new laptop in January!

My message has turned into a new question, sorry. I believe I will install
the 2003 code and adopt the beta bit by bit, unless you and other experts
here suggest otherwise. I will also go back to the Office12 site and see if
they have dealt with this upgrade question there.

Thanks, again, for your reply!

Jonathan

"Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]" wrote:

There is no need to install Outlook 2003. You can simply copy the old ..pst file to the new machine and open it with the File | Open | Outlook Data File command.