30-Day Trial?

[Barkerductions]

I've owned (and paid for) MS Office for years. I just upgraded my
Macintosh G4 (running OS 10.3.9) to a G5 (running OS 10.4.2) about 2
weeks ago. I've been using Word and PowerPoint fine. Yesterday I tried
using Excel for the first time since my upgrade and I got the message
that I only have 17 days left of my 30-day trial period! Uh...what?! I
really had to get my document printed and off so I decided to deal with
it later. Of course, I found out you can't print a "trial period" Excel
document. Egads!

I reinstalled Excel since all the others worked fine. If I
double-clicked the document, I still got the trial period, but if I
opened the application directly, then opened the file through Excel, I
was able to work properly.

Well, I figured I could live with that for a while. ...Until I tried to
open Word! Corrupted or missing files and unable to open. When I tried
PowerPoint, it opened Excel! And Entourage only opened the address
book; nothing else! What a mess.

Okay...I dumped it all and reinstalled (the long way) the entire Office
suite. All seemed fine. All opened fine. UNTIL I double-clicked on an
Excel document and got the 30-day trial period again. Grrrr...

Any suggestions? When I reinstalled Office, I went through the
"uninstall old versions" process, so hopefully nothing was left behind.
I don't know where the trial period version is coming from.

Help.

 

[Neill Massello]

Any suggestions? When I reinstalled Office, I went through the
"uninstall old versions" process, so hopefully nothing was left behind.
I don't know where the trial period version is coming from.

The Office Test Drive came pre-installed on your G5's hard drive. That's
one reason why, after doing some exploration and testing, I like to
erase a new Mac's drive, do a clean installation of the system using a
retail installer (if available), and a selective installation of other
software, using Pacifist if necessary.

 

[Barkerductions]

Didn't realize that. Do you know of any way to get rid of it? I'd've
thought that the "uninstall old versions" would have done it. Obviously
not. And I wonder why it's just doing it to Excel...not Word, PPT,
etc.? If it's a question of doing a clean install of the system (which
I don't have, btw) or living with it, I guess I'll have to live with
it. Not that big of a deal, now that I think of it...just irritating
that I have to do it.

Thanks for your quick response, Neill.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Didn't realize that. Do you know of any way to get rid of it? I'd've
thought that the "uninstall old versions" would have done it. Obviously
not. And I wonder why it's just doing it to Excel...not Word, PPT,
etc.? If it's a question of doing a clean install of the system (which
I don't have, btw) or living with it, I guess I'll have to live with
it. Not that big of a deal, now that I think of it...just irritating
that I have to do it.

You shouldn't have to live with it OR do a clean install of the system.
It seems that TD is somewhat difficult to get rid of if you install
Office on top of it, which is why the MacTopia site recommends removing
it prior to Office installation.

With all Office apps closed, run the Remove Office application from your
Office 2004 install disk. You can choose to remove all copies of Office
2004, or, I believe, just the Office 2004 TD. Given your efforts to
date, I would opt to remove all versions, then reinstall Office and
apply SP2.

Before you do this, however, it would be a good idea to make sure you
repair disk permissions using the Disk Utility application.

 

[Barkerductions]

Thanks. I have repaired the disk permissions already, but I don't
suppose it would hurt to do it again. I'll take your advise and get rid
of EVERYTHING and start from scratch again. Oh, the joy! 8^)