If It's Broke, You Gotta Fix It!
We all know how great the Office
programs are when they work, but we all ALSO know how frustrating they
are when they DON'T work or produce error messages we don't understand.
Well, Office 2000 and XP include a feature that can often help us when
we have problems.
In each of the Office programs, if you
click on the Help menu, you will see a command that says "Detect
and Repair". Clicking on that will produce this box:
Notice that it says you may be asked to
provide the installation source during this process, so be sure to have
the Office CD handy. In fact, it's best to just put it in your CD
drive before you even start this, then you won't be bothered by the box
that will eventually pop up and ask you where the CD is located.
Once you click on the Start button in
this box, you will see the Installer running. Just sit back and
let it do its stuff. When it is finished, it will tell you that
Office has been repaired. A lot of times, this will fix your
problem before you tear all your hair out trying other things that just
don't work, so always try this one first.
Now, sometimes the problem prevents you
from even opening the program, so you can't even get to the Help menu to
run this. In that case, click on your Windows Start button and go
to Settings and select Control Panel. In this box, double click on
the icon that says Add/Remove Programs. In this list, scroll down
to Microsoft Office and double click on this. Depending on what
version of Windows you have, you will have a choice to
"Change" or "Repair" Office. Select one of
these and you will get to the same Installer box. This will repair
ALL of the Office programs, whereas selecting Detect and Repair from
within the Help menu of any one program only repairs that particular
program. And, sometimes running Detect and Repair from within a
program doesn't fix the problem, so the next thing I do is run the full
Office repair from the Control Panel.
Granted, this doesn't fix ALL problems,
but it's the best place to start.
Hang in there!
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