Office 2007 woes

Written by Sam McGeown
Published on 30/5/2007 - Read in about 2 min (377 words)

Originally published Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

Wahey! I got published this week in IT Week, ok it was only a readers letter, but I got in! Here’s what I wrote:

“New software always excites me, so I was enthusiastic as I installed Office 2007 on my laptop. The machine offers more than enough grunt for my media applications, but sadly not quite enough to install Office in less than 15 minutes, plus one restart.

Next came a surprise when I double-clicked on a Word document and saw the familiar Office 2003 interface. A quick check showed that my “upgrade” had left a side-by-side install of both Office 2003 and 2007. So I thought: “I’ll just uninstall 2003 - what harm can that do?” Bad move. One uninstall and reboot left me with no working office software. Office 2003 is no more; Office 2007 is crippled by grief for its lost brother.

Another 15 minutes for repair, another reboot and at last I was ready to revolutionise my productivity. A report was due by the end of the week, so I clicked on the SharePoint library to retrieve the document, and IE crashed. Debugging showed a problem opening Office 2007 documents…

Can someone remind me why Office 2007 is better?”

You can check out the article on the IT Week website

Rather than just a whine though, I thought I’d add some tips on getting your 2007 install working.

  •  Most of the problems are due to a mix of versions - if you can avoid having old versions installed, do it.
  • Make sure you’re not trying to deploy/manage older verisons of Office through Group Policy as this will upset 2007 (Remove the computer/user from the policy, run a gpupdate, reboot and then check it!)
  • Run the office repair tool. It’s pretty effective at spotting the problem, but don’t expect to get away without a reboot. Now is a good time to get a cup of tea, read a book, paint that masterpiece you’ve always wanted to.
  • You may get a “ExSec32.dll is not compatible with Outlook” error - this is the same issue as before with the 2003/2000 version being used instead of the 2007. Office repair should sort that, but you may need to manually delete ExSec32.dll.
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