February top customer support calls on Office

Every month I get a report from support which tells me what the most common support issues are with my product.  Now that the 2007 release is out, we are starting to get some more support calls and a few issues come up regularly and are therefore worth a post I thought.

Office 2007 over terminal services

If you get the error "This copy of Microsoft Office [Excel/Word] cannot be used on Terminal Server" it is because you are trying to use a non enterprise version of the application.  Only the volume licensing versions of the applications will work over Terminal Services and this is by design.  If you are trying to use a retail version of Office to do this, you need to obtain the VL version or suite, Office Professional Plus or Office Enterprise with a valid volume licensing key.  You cannot use Office Professional as purchased through retail.

Also there are complications on the licensing side which you need to think about.  Currently every device that could use Microsoft Office needs a license, whether it uses terminal services or not.

How to open Word 2007 files from an earlier version

Not surprising that this is coming up.  See my earlier post about our solution to this.  This scenario is what the file compatibility pack is for.  This is all documented in kb 924074 and applies to Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 and opening with versions 2000, 2002 and 2003.

Cannot insert page numbers

The symptoms described in the article are:

When you try to insert a page number in a Microsoft Office Word 2007 document, the page number options and the gallery styles for the Top of Page, Bottom of Page, Page Margins, or Current Position settings may be unavailable or missing.
For example, when you click Page Number in the Header & Footer group on the Insert tab and then point to Top of Page, the Save Selection as Page Number (Top) option is unavailable.

it should look like the picture on the right.  The solution describes restoring the Building Blocks.dotx file used by this feature.

Beta software has expired

You receive a message when you try to start a 2007 Office program: "Your beta software has expired".  This kb goes through how to remove the beta after which you will need to either download the trial from https://ukireland.trymicrosoftoffice.com or purchase the full product which you can do from all good online and high street retailers.  Don't worry you won't lose your documents as the uninstall does not delete these and they will still be there on the other side once you have installed the full version.

Older PowerPoint presentations have layout issues in PowerPoint 2007

We are beginning to see repeated incidents of incorrect layout of text in legacy presentations when opened up in PowerPoint 2007. So far, all of them have been due to printer drivers.