I needed to read a Word2007 document on my home computer this evening and had to download the following files to read the document –

• Word 2003 viewer – 12MB
• Word Viewer 2003 Service Pack 3 – 12MB
• Office 2007 compatability pack – 28MB

For some reason, one of my (terminal) servers has started to show funky dialog boxes in office applications. Everything looks plain, like in vb3 days and the options dialog box in outlook is unusable as the dialog is too small for the content. Any ideas on what has caused this?
Wrong dialog box

Correct Dialog box – everything fits in the screen (although I snipped the bottom off)

Update – Mike – you are a genius. The funny thing is that I thought it was the fonts but at first glance it seemed ok. However, I compared the fonts in the appearance setting of the display applet in control panel and sure enough, the font settings were blank. A look at the Tahoma font in the font applet and it was 0 bytes – aha! Installed Tahoma again across the network and the fonts and dialog boxes are now back to normal. – Sir, I owe you a pint.

I’ve spent ages trying to work out how to modify a form in Word2007. This is because the bits that you need in the ribbon bar are not displayed by default. In order to fix this, Click the Microsoft Office Button , and then click Word Options. Click Popular and then select the Show Developer tab in the Ribbon check box, and then click OK.
You can get more help on form creation and design by going to Help / Creating Specific Documents / Forms

Tried to install the Office2007 cd and got told that I already had beta 2007 components installed (which is actually the Expression Beta) as per the error “Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s): The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies. Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.”
Several blogs later (funnily enough the first response in google was Scott’s page which I already read on a daily basis) I followed the instructions at kb928218 and removed the Expression Beta (which I had already removed from Add Remove programs and the My Uninstall program)

It turns out that if Word does not spell check a document and you get a message that Word has spell checked parts of the document (sorry can’t remember the exact error message) you can get Word to check the whole thing by selecting all the text (ctrl-A) and then going to the Tools menu, selecting Language (of all things) and then selecting and unselecting the option “Do not spell check selected text”
Took me quite a while to figure that one out as I was looking under spelling options and custom.dic’s etc – not under languages!

…when you double click on them but will from the File/Open menu was a weird one that I hadn’t come across before. However, following the instructions in a Google Groups posting where the tools | options | general | ignore other applications was unchecked and it worked. Very strange. Not sure why this has started to happen but it works – *shrug*