problems with a system restore

[Tezza]

Hi, my first post on this site. I've been trying to speed up my laptop by getting ridding of programs I don't use and have inadvertently deleted Microsoft Office Professional 2003 edition. Obviously all my Excel and Word packages stopped working. I've now done a sytem restore and, whilst the Microsoft programs "appear" to be OK I can't actualy open any of them. A pop up box appears saying "Windows Installer" preparing for installation. This may be related to an earlier problem whereby I did a microsoft update (and have had problems ever since). You can probably gather I'm not that hot with the technical stuff. Hope someone can help

[BeeCeeBee]

Do you have your Office disks available to you?

[RandyL]

Can you please tell us a whole lot more about what problems you were having with the Microsoft update? What was the update?

 

How did you remove these programs?

 

Do you still have the Microsoft Office Professional 2003 Disks?

You probably need to reinstall it.

The windows 3.0 installer should be included.

[Tezza]

Unfortunately I don't have the MS office 2003 discs as it's an old work lap top.

 

As far as I'm aware the update that I did was for all microsoft applications. it took a long while and scanned my laptop for all updates needed for my current programs. This consequently made my lap top run super slow which is why I went down the "remove programs" route.

[Tezza]

I removed the MS package through the Add/Remove programs in the control panel. Stupidly thinking that, because the icon next to MS Office 2003 said I hadn't used the program for 2 years that I must have been using another version of Office

[RandyL]

Tezza it sounds like you have removed Office 2003 from this old work laptop. Of course you wouldn't have the disks as it was probably installed through a volume license with your employer. Does this sound right?

 

Either way and no matter the cause you will most likely need to reinstall it which you can not do without the disks.

 

While that is not good news there is a very good option which I use myself. Once I updated to Vista I could not use my Office 2000 files. Fortunately Open Office can. It should work just fine for all your Office 2003 files. Actually I prefer it.

 

You can download Open Office free. And it will remain free.

 

Your other issues may be of concern down the road especially if you ever need to reinstall XP so please keep your data backed up.

[Tezza]

Thanks RandyL - I've backed up my important files and then downloaded the program you recomended. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have fixed the problem. When I want to open an Excel document a pop up appears with "Windows Installer" at the top, saying it is preparing to install. If I leave this running it eventually comes up with another pop up with "Document Viewer" at the top and says "The feature you are trying to install is on a CD-Rom or other removable disc that is not available". I think this has something to do with the windows update I performed earlier last week. Or it could be linked to deleting the MS Office 2003. Either way I can't view my Excel or Word documents. Any ideas?

[Tony D]

Right now, your computer thinks that Word should be used to open .doc files and that Excel shoudl be used to oprn .xls file. Since you don't have either Word or Excel, you need a work-around.

 

1) You can open OpenOffice's word processor or spreadsheet program and then use the FILE > OPEN function to open the intended document.

 

2) Alternatively, you can tell your computer what program to open the documents when you double click on them. Go Open any folder and go to Tools > Folder Options. Scroll down to DOC, highlight it and click on CHANGE. Select OpenOffice.org and click OK. That will fix the MS Word documents. To fix the MS Excell docs - again to to Tools > Folder Options and scroll down to XLS and click CHANGE. Select OpenOffice.org and click OK.

[Tezza]

Kelly - Thanks very much for that - that's finally sorted it!

[BeeCeeBee]

It's always great when the answer comes from a member helping another. A long tradition for Kelly from 2007 :)