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Opening .MDI in Office 2007

What is MDI and where is it used?

MDI is a propriatery image format developed by Microsoft for purposes of creating raster images of scanned documents and print to file functions. The format also allows for metadata to be embedded into files for uses inside Microsoft Office documents. The cool thing Office is you can print directly to a file using the "Microsoft Office Document Image Writer". Now I know there is Adobe PDF printer ( which is much better and I do use now ), but this feature is built into Office and is available. The issue with MDI support is it requires "Microsoft Office Document Imaging" which is installed by default in Office 2003, but not in Office 2007 or Office Vista. If you upgrade or re-install it, you lose support unless you install it manually.

So why is this an issue not having it? Absolutely nothing to me since I use Acrobat PDF for everything instead of MDI. I do have old MDI documents that I would print receipts off of the internet from ( I don't like wasting paper and won't ever use it offline ) and I had no support for them! I dug around, nothing supports MDI format. So I went into the installation options and found what I was looking for.

I thought I would share this to make life easier for anyone stuck in the same situation before they purchase software to support it.

Installing MDI in Office 2007 and Office Vista

Go into Control Panel then Add or Remove Programs
Find Microsoft Office on the list
Click on Change
Click on Add or Remove Features ->  Continue
Click on the plus next to Office Tools
Click on the box with the down arrow on Microsoft Office Document Imaging
Select Run All From My Computer
Click Continue

And now you have support for MDI in Office 2007 and Office Vista.