Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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In my recent article about the Twelve Things I Hate About Microsoft Office, I led off with my biggest peeve — that there is no one to help you with the really difficult problems — mainly due to the complexity of the product line.

This week I must vent again, because I am one of the many users of the new Office Beta, and while I realize that beta means potential problems are there to be solved, the lack of integration between Office and Windows makes the use of the beta problematic.

Ironically this 13^th issue came to a head exactly on Friday the 13^th (coincidence, I don't think so) — October 13, 2006. I had been using Office 2007 on my desktop PC in relative harmony with Office 2003 for a while.

In typical Microsoft fashion no one ever warned me that the one exception to this cohabitation of apps was Outlook — Outlook 2007 co-opted 2003 and took over. This was relatively benign for a while; it only required a reinstallation two or three times when I tried to open the program and the error message was straightforward. I went out for lunch, put my disc in, and everything was okay.

Then I returned from a trip and installed the beta 2 "technical refresh" — which looked like a new version but installed what appeared to be a "patch."

Again this worked fine until the 13^th, when I noted that Windows Update had done its thing overnight, rebooted the computer and Outlook would not open. Nada.

I got a dialog box that informed me that I had an "OLMAPI32.DLL" error of some kind, and googling the exact message I found that I was not alone with this issue. Apparently the installation files were corrupt and needed to be reinstalled. Many had tried to uninstall and reinstall and a few had succeeded in having it solve this problem.

But nothing — not Control Panel or the heretofore helpful installation discs — allowed me to uninstall or successfully reinstall either Outlook or the entire Office suite.

Each time the process looked for a file in my MSO installation folder which it said it could not find, but which I was able to locate quite easily. I saw the file — but the installation process did not. There was simply no way to point the installation to that file, or similar files on my original discs, to spur the process to conclusion.

More perplexing was the fact that when I tried a Custom Install to get Outlook alone, the DVD showed that all of the sudden the Outlook installation was totally unavailable. It was "x"-ed out.

Each time I reinstalled the process aborted with an arcane error message naming something called "OSetupControllerIntl_1003", which I recognized as a registry entry of some kind.

It seemed that in addition to the Windows Update problem, the technical refresh had confused the beta into which installation it was trying to install.

I googled again and found that some folks had solved the problem using Reg Cleaner, so I bought the product, manually removed all references to this entry, and scanned and cleaned the entire Registry. I tried again — no dice — although the "X" over Outlook was now gone.

Now having seen many references to this situation online, you would think that Microsoft would address it somewhere. You would think that you could find a fix on the beta site — but as I wrote in the original article, "who you gonna call?"

Finally I decided to purchase the discs of the new beta and ordered them, figuring I'd wait patiently til they arrive. Then I got impatient and for another buck and half bought the download. You would think that the Microsoft site would remember me when I logged in and know my address and credit card info (anyone remember their wonderful Passport service?) but I dutifully typed it in and ordered the download.

Whoosh, the page with the link disappeared and I was back to the order page. This is another typical thing — you don't logically return to pages you need anywhere in Microsoft.com. Instead I returned to where I started, and I could order again...

So I waited for email with the link which did show up.

Usually one can't remember or reconstruct these sequences of events weeks later, so it is difficult to describe the typical Microsoft frustration that makes the Mac ads so believable. The problem is the obvious inordinate complexity of the Office/Windows Axis of Evil — in this case I am sure that Windows Update corrupted a file or files that Beta 2007 requires to work properly in messaging (Outlook).

You would think that someone with the beta team would have anticipated the issues raised by technical updates for Windows — and warned users to turn Automatic Update off — but that is probably in a different building on a different campus. The place is just too fricking huge.

So now I am going to try to reinstall the downloaded new version. Wish me luck. It is only 24 hours later, October 14...

Here's the thing — everyone who uses MS products and Office in particular has experienced this. Now I just started the installation, and 3 times the thing asked me "do I really want to install this?" Hey, I downloaded 500MB for a buck and half, what do you think I want to do?

Oh, I know I have options. I can probably "chat" with some guy in Bangladesh who will ask me which operating system I am using and the serial number of my motherboard.

But can I get an answer? The irony is that the best way to find anything in the MS Knowledge Base is through Google. That will also point the way to the only folks who can really solve these types of problems — the end users...

Oh, now I understand why the MS beta process is so long. They need their users to help them re-code their products.

Oh, my installation is — uh oh. I got a familiar dialog box.

Figure 1137

I got that wonderful OSetupControllerIntl_1003 message again. I think I'll just cry.

What I don't understand is how average users without a wealth of experience, patience and technical knowledge ever solve these issues. I guess if they're smart, they don't mess around with beta software.

In my case I'm lucky I have a laptop with a working version of Office 2003. I may not update it til 2020.

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