Uninstall Office 2008

[JE McGimpsey]

McGhie describes the fonts mess exactly. I am still sorting it out little by
little.

Hmm... you posted this as a reply to a problem with MyDay. Is there a
tie-in there?

 

[JE McGimpsey]

BTW, the simple way for Microsoft to avoid this mess is if Office installed
NO fonts at all and needed only the basic Apple system fonts to function
correctly. Naturally, users could always add additional fonts that they
wanted to use. Rather than Microsoft throwing over a hundred fonts into our
folders in a confusing manner involving multiple folders.

That would be simple, and anyone who exchanges documents with WinOffice
users would scream about the incompatibility.

I would guess (from professional experience, and from the volume of
posts in these newsgroups) that there are *far* more people who would be
inconvenienced by having to buy fonts that come standard with WinOffice
than are having problems with the fonts which are installed by MacOffice.

 

[iGreg]

So make it an optional install. Give the user a choice, for maximum windows compatibility then allow the install to occur. There currently is a choice of installing ALL Office fonts and it seems to imply they are necessary for Office to work properly, thats not a good choice. We need multiple choices.

 

[CyberTaz]

Inclusion of fonts *is* optional at the time of installation.

As JE suggests, a custom install is simple enough as long as the user has no
intention of accurately rendering documents from others or any expectation
of having their documents accurately reproduced elsewhere.

If you have a problem with those installed with Office, don't ever install
the Adobe Creative Suite

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Carl_Rambert]

Intel Mac System with Office 2004 installed. Installed Office 2008 for Universal binary (run faster?) and Office 2007 compatibility. Installed 12.0.1 when it came out. Installed SP1 (12.1.0), after two weeks the broken "double click open" was hard to live with. Never used Entourage or Messenger in either 2004 or 2008. So did uninstall of 2008 and new install 2008.

Now launch Word 2008, Excel 2008, or Powerpoint 2008 -> "There is a problem with the office database" advises to use Microsoft Database Utility to rebuild database, Done (now twice). No change. Launch Entourage looking for a solution -> "This Identity cannot be opened with this version of Entourage" and it exits.

There should be nothing in this database that needs to be saved. Is there a way to delete the database and have Office 2008 build a clean one?

RE: 2007 compatibility - Embedded images in a Word 2007 .doc files are sometimes displayed as a black box, same for both 2004 and 2008.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Office 2008 SP1 updated the database format--now that you are running
Office 2008 pre-SP1, it can't open it. Word/Excel/PPT draw on the
database for various things--Scrapbook, contacts, etc.

Anyhow, the database is stored at [username]/Documents/Microsoft User
Data/Main Identity [unless you renamed the Main Identity]

You can dump the Main Identity folder and Office will create a new one.
If you think you might need something out of it, use right-click Create
Archive to zip it, rename it, and move it, and Office should create a
new one.

Re your picture problem--please start a NEW thread to get attention for
a separate issue.

 

[Carl_Rambert]

Daiya,

Thanks, worked for me. I added the folder name
"Office 2008 Identities" to the path.

Office 2008 SP1 updated the database format--now that you are running
Office 2008 pre-SP1, it can't open it. Word/Excel/PPT draw on the
database for various things--Scrapbook, contacts, etc.

Anyhow, the database is stored at

[username]/
Documents/
Microsoft User Data/
Office 2008 Identities/
Main Identity

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Oops, sorry. My mistake, glad you sorted it, hope it wasn't too confusing.

Daiya,

Thanks, worked for me. I added the folder name
"Office 2008 Identities" to the path.

Office 2008 SP1 updated the database format--now that you are running
Office 2008 pre-SP1, it can't open it. Word/Excel/PPT draw on the
database for various things--Scrapbook, contacts, etc.

Anyhow, the database is stored at

[username]/
Documents/
Microsoft User Data/
Office 2008 Identities/
Main Identity

You can dump the Main Identity folder and Office will create a new one.