The latest version of Business Plan Pro automatically reads and converts files from Business Plan Pro versions 2003 or newer and a free utility is available to open plans from Business Plan Pro 2002 or Business Plan Pro v4.0

• To convert a plan from version 2003 or newer:
  1. Open the latest edition of Business Plan Pro.
  2. Select 'Open an Existing Plan' from the Start a Plan screen.
  3. Select More files ... and click OK.
  4. Browse to the plan that needs to be converted (these files are stored by default in the My Documents folder on your C:\ drive).
  5. Highlight the plan's .bpd file and select Open.
  
  The conversion process will now run automatically and the plan will be displayed in Business Plan Pro.
• For plans created in earlier versions
  Download and install the Conversion Utility using the steps below:
  Download the file directly from our Web site
  1. Click on either of the links below to download the convertion utility from our Web site:
     

     Conversion Utility

     Alternate Download

  2. When prompted by Windows, choose to Save this file to the Desktop of your computer.
  3. Once the file has downloaded completely, close any open programs and then double click on the Pas8ConversionUtility.exe to install the utility.

  Convert the plan files:
  Once the installation has completed, click on the shortcut for the "Palo Alto Software Conversion Utility" which can be found within the Program Files folder for Palo Alto Software with-in the Start menu. This will launch the Conversion Utility, take the following steps to convert your plan file:

  1. Beside the Source file box, click the Browse button to browse to and select your 4.0 or 2002 plan files.
  2. Beside the Destination File box, click the Browse button and the enter a file name for your new plan file.

     We recommend using a different file name than the source file to maintain a backup copy of the original file.

  3. Click the Convert Plan button. This process will take a few minutes, when the conversion is complete, a dialog box will be displayed.
  4. Click the OK button and then close the Conversion Utility if you have no other plans to convert. If you do have other files to convert, repeat steps 1 through 3 for each additional business plan file.

Once the plan has been converted, follow the steps listed above for 2003/2004 conversion to open your plan file.

Versions older than 4.0:

If you're working with files from version 3, we can convert those files for you for a small fee. If you would like our Diagnostic team to convert an older version file for you, you can find information on the process in the following article:

You can also just copy and paste to convert. This is not ideal, but to be fair to the problem, we do provide backward compatibility with every upgrade, but with all the changes in operating systems and features and functionality we are not able to jump back in time four or five years to pick up files that old in the latest version. The last time we built a version 3 disk was in the late summer of 1999, so it has been a long time. And part of the problem is that you didn't upgrade to 4, or to 2002.

For conversions from Version 2, those files are six or seven years old, and Version 1 files are even older. True, Microsoft seems to do that kind of thing with Word and Excel, and we salute them for it, but we didn't have the foresight in 1996 to build a file that would support all the functionality we now have.

Tim Berry