Fixed Office

Posted on June 25, 2005 No Comments

Since I got this new laptop, I’ve been wrestling with trying to get it to run the automated Office Updates thing from Microsoft. It failed every time with the message, “Office Update is unable to check for updates.” I theorized that was related to the fact that when I got this laptop, it came with a trial version of office 2k3 and a copy of MS Works installed. I promptly removed both of those on day 1 and installed a licensed copy from work (it is the work machine after all). I went through the suggestions on that failure screen. All to no avail. The suggestions didn’t really apply and while I found reference to other people having similar issues I didn’t really see any solutions.

So on Friday I broke down and uninstalled all the MS Office stuff. Reinstalled just one piece (Visio) and tried the update deal. no love, same error. However… this time I noticed a link from the update page on troubleshooting. Now, I’ll be the first to admint I’m a bit wary of MS’s troubleshooters and stuff, but I figured that I was going to be calling for support soon (omg /blush) so I better be able to say I did the self-help crap first…

An hour later I was still trudging through the various things to try. Until I got to “Method 7” — and there was a link to something called the Microsoft Installer CleanUp Utility. Oh ho! That seemed promising. And lo and behold, the first entry in it was garbage! I smoked that, lit up the Office Updater again and all was golden. Yay!

The moral? I suppose I should grudgingly admit that not all online troubleshooting things are worthless.

Speaking of Office, as mentioned before I sometimes use OpenOffice on some of the machines around home. To read and write Word and Excel type stuff it seems to do the job just fine at a price I sure love. I’ve always been a little sad, however, that nobody has really come up with a decent alternative to Access. Sure, there’s lots of free/cheap little databases, but that’s not really why I use access. I use it for the quick forms/reports building and the ability to link into other (enterprise) databases for queries and data manipulation. Well there may finally be something out there and it is called the Kexi Project. To be honest, I know very little about it so far and until my current project at work is closer to being done it’ll stay that way. But I DO look forward to having a look at it soon. From just reading their site a bit it seems to be just the ticket.

[later]

I just noticed Open Office.org v2 offers something called Base. It too appears to be a potential access replacement. I wonder if it is related to Kexi? Their descriptions almost appear to be written by the same person.

Tags: access, microsoft, office, openOffice