In technical support, there is a common knee-jerk reaction when something doesn’t work in Microsoft Office: run a repair of the product or reinstall it. My colleagues have probably spent several hours combined going through this step countless times. Often (often is 99% of time) this fails to resolve whatever issue they are encountering. Over the course of a few years of troubleshooting Office, a repair has only corrected an issue once ( or maybe twice). In our case, it’s the nature of the custom environment that is chock-full-o-add-ins. Other times it is some weird, unexplained element of a document, spreadsheet, or whatever that just doesn’t want to work. Those can be rather complex to figure out sometimes.

That being said, sometimes repairing MS Office fixes issues in areas you might not otherwise think.  For example, I recently setup a small document library in SharePoint, but while trying to edit the files from Internet Explorer some of the tech workstations were reporting the following error: “Windows Internet Explorer – ‘Edit Document’ requires a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible application and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or greater.”
Read the rest of this entry »