Did you recently have a trial version of Office 2007 on your computer and decided to uninstall it? Often, the uninstaller in the trial version of Office will break. This leaves Office 2007 permanently on your computer, in an unusable state. I had this happen to a client’s computer today and had to run some tools in order to get Office 2007 reinstalled.

When I tried to install Office 2007 “over” the trial edition, the installer would get a vague error saying “Office 2007 encountered an error during setup.”

The fix:

The following instructions are at your own risk. We take no responsibility if it leaves your computer is a damaged state.

1. Manually uninstall as many components of Office 2007 as possible:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928218/

2. To forcefully uninstall a program on your computer, download the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility at:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

Once installed, it should appear in the “All programs” section of the Start Menu. Run the program. Remove all instances of Office 2007 (trial, student and home edition, etc.) Reboot the machine. Run the installer for the  full version of the Office 2007 product you purchased. It should now install.

If you uploaded some Microsoft Office 2007 files onto your Apache server, you will notice that the files will open up as a zip file from your browser. To fix this, you will need to add the new file extensions to the Apache configuration file so that it will know how to set the correct file type. At first, I tried editing the /etc/mime.types file, but that did not work for me. So, I added the file types into the Apache configuration file and voila — it worked.

In Apache, edit the httpd.conf file. Or, in Apache2 edit the apache2.conf file. Search for the section with the AddType keywords. Make sure you backup the configuration file before making any changes. Add the following lines:

# MIME type fix
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet .xlsx
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document .docx
AddType application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow .pptx


Make sure to test the syntax of the configuration file using apache2ctl configtest or apachectl configtest. Then restart the Apache service via apache2ctl restart or apachectl restart.

If you need to support all Microsoft Office 2007 file extensions, please check out this webmasterworld post.