Last week I had to apply SR-1a to my Excel installation. I’m sure I should have applied that release long ago, but I’m a procrastinator. If it doesn’t fix a problem that I currently have, I’m not too quick to get it.
The first gripe I had about updating office is that I had to find my CDs. Why do they make me do that? They can’t be verifying that I’m a paying customer, because if I stole the CDs, I would just use the stolen ones. Unless there’s something I don’t know about the process, I assume stolen CDs would work as well as legitimate ones.
And it’s not just one CD. My FrontPage installation is on separate CD than the rest of Office. So more CDs that I have to find. What a pain.
I updated, restarted, and it fixed the problem that I was having. Then I go into the VBE to test something. I wanted to see if using SendKeys with the escape key would solve this little ActiveX control problem. I don’t use SendKeys very often so I couldn’t remember if it was {ESC} or {ESCAPE} (it turns out it’s both). To find out, I put my cursor on SendKeys at hit F1. Would you like to guess what happened then? An installation dialog that eventually asked me to insert my FrontPage disk. Oh, you mean the disk that I just put away 1/2 hour ago, that disk? It took me 15 minutes to learn that both ways were syntactically correct.
I have two gripes with this: Why does Excel VBA help require anything that has to do with FrontPage? You might say it’s because Help is an office wide component, but it didn’t ask for my office disk, just the FrontPage disk. And why the hell didn’t it just install this part when I was installing the service release? I always do custom installs that include the VBA help, so it should have already been setup.
The result of this is that I will not be installing any more service releases unless I really need them. I’m probably throwing the baby out with bath water, but I don’t care. End of gripe.
In a previous life I was a desktop engineer creating autoinstall scripts.
Way back in Excel 97, I created an administrative install point. Can remember the exact terminology, but it’s a special install to a network location which other users can install from.
There was a tool called NIW which allowed preloaded templates and stuff into the installation.
I believe Office admin installs work the same way today.
You can install service packs over the admin install point.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;829197
Pretty useless info for a one computer installation. I was thinking something along the lines of an install point then copying it off to DVD. I’ve never tried it so it’s all theory.
It’s handier when you’ve got a file server.
PS. I feel your pain. I hate digging for CDs too.
When I did the updates there was link for more information, when I clicked on that it took me to a page where I could download the update instead of install it. When you apply the downloaded update it does not ask for the CDs.
Maybe it needs some “functionality” off the original CD to install the new stuff (unlikely but you never know!) – so where did you get the SP from dick – I would have though the net anyway – hun?
One thing I noticed is that the same thing happens when you try and uninstall ms software. Recently, I have been trying to tidy up my PC, and I’m sorry to say that out off all the program I have on there, Microsoft’s are simple horrendous to remove. VB6 for example, I think will be with me forever!, and IE simply cant be removed either, (I can understand VB6, a bit, but not IE, it almost seam anti- competitive!)
Today I got a copy of SP-2 (on CD) and VB2005 beta (free with PC pro mag!). I am think i have resided myself to a reinstall of XP and a “fresh start”. I think i’ll get a nice new big HDD, move my files across, reformat my current 80gb disk, partition it and put xp-sp2, and some flavour of Linux on. – I’ve been thinking about this for a while anyway, I need to start using linux, that might well be when the next 20 years will be based?
As an aside: try Linux and playstation in a MS product – w##ke#s
Thanks for the comments (and sympathy) guys. I won’t be switching to linux anytime soon. I can’t even keep up with learning Excel and now I’m going to have to learn something about blogging. I think I’m regressing. At this rate, I’ll have aol.com in my email address before long.
Related gripe, is when you add functionality to an installed version of Office XP and can not use any Office XP CD, but have to root around for the installed copy for that particular PC. Why? The software is already installed, I’m only adding say VBA Help or the Query addin.