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So, I bought my first laptop a few weeks ago, so that while I'm here in Korea I can keep in regular contact with family etc., but I of course figured I'd be using it for the occasional word processing task--this is where you kids come in.

When I try to open my Microsoft Word Starter App., I get a message telling me it cannot be opened and I should either try again or go to the Control Panel to try repairing the product.

Trying it again invariably leads to the same message, while after repairing it, I was given the same message.

For the record, I didn't purchase Microsoft Office because 1) in the steps leading to my buying said laptop, the option wasn't presented to me, and 2) I don't really use my computer for much outside of word processing and web surfing.

A window has popped up asking me if I've already purchased Office, or whether I'd like to go online to do so; I figure that's the easiest solution, but I'm wondering if you all think there's something wrong with my system, or if given my needs/expectations I really don't need the full version, or if yes, I should just go online and buy the suite.

Thanks in advance.

According to Wikipedia, this is a simplified version of Office installed OEM on some computers.

I have little to no idea how to solve your problem, since my computer came with a 60-day free trial of the full version of MS Office, rather than MS Office Starter. That said, I can do xkcd-style tech support, and offer you these two pages:
* http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/...a3-16d840194333 , which links to...
* http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/...6d-0d9df26a5b0f

One idea I might have is to wholly supersede your Office Starter with an actual Office install. I know I did that by installing Office 2007 over 2010, and the only noticeable remnants of 2010 are links telling me to get the full version, which I can easily ignore.

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 6th September 2011 15:41

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

Did your laptop come with a disc that included all the pre-installed software? Perhaps a total reinstall of the Starter kit would fix what you need to be fixed, though I say that having never actually heard of Starter before your post.

For my money, if you're really just needing word processing, maybe the best solution is just to dump all of Office anyway and get OpenOffice.org, which is free and can do just about everything Word can - I did find that when I was editing my wife's masters' thesis that some of the high-end formatting I was required Word to get just right, but she did 90% of the actual writing in OpenOffice and didn't have any issues with it at all.

Alternatively, you could put all of your word processing into the cloud and use Google Docs, but that might be a more extreme solution, particularly if you don't have internet everywhere you go with your laptop.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

OpenOffice unfortunately doesn't deal well with .docx/.xlsx/etc. filetypes, which are the default filetype used by MS Office 2007 and later, and are thus used by clueless people whose computers came with MSO 07 and later. Last I checked, OO can read but not write .foox files.

(There's also a few formatting issues, where a document made and formatted in MS Word might show up weirdly in OO Writer. Also, OO Impress, the equivalent to MS Powerpoint, is kinda crappy the last time I used it. Haven't upgraded in a year or so though.)

I wonder if MS Office Starter also does .foox files. Alternatively, I wonder if it's possible to make them save in the older .foo formats.

FYI: I use both OO 3.2 (or something around that number) and MSO 2007.

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 6th September 2011 17:51

--------------------

Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

Quote (Glenn Magus Harvey @ 6th September 2011 12:50)

OpenOffice unfortunately doesn't deal well with .docx/.xlsx/etc. filetypes, which are the default filetype used by MS Office 2007 and later, and are thus used by clueless people whose computers came with MSO 07 and later. Last I checked, OO can read but not write .foox files.

(There's also a few formatting issues, where a document made and formatted in MS Word might show up weirdly in OO Writer. Also, OO Impress, the equivalent to MS Powerpoint, is kinda crappy the last time I used it. Haven't upgraded in a year or so though.)

I wonder if MS Office Starter also does .foox files. Alternatively, I wonder if it's possible to make them save in the older .foo formats.

FYI: I use both OO 3.2 (or something around that number) and MSO 2007.

Yeah, and I use both of the same as well. Impress definitely sucks, but I've never had any significant issues at all with .docx files moving back and forth.

I took from his original post that since he's doing "Word Processing," that Word would be his primary issue, and for my money OO Writer does just fine with them in most applications. Additionally, if he's generating more files than he gets from other sources and then edits, then the issues of external files importing strangely probably won't be a big deal either.

If it comes down to spending a hundred bucks versus not, I think most people would be willing to live with the issues, but that's really Kane's call. I was just trying to give him some other options beyond dealing with uninstalling/reinstalling software, possibly over and over, or ponying up money. It's not like he couldn't still buy Office later if he decided he needed Powerpoint all of a sudden, or if all of his files were horribly broken by OO Writer.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

Thanks for the responses, you two. I think I'll probably end up going with Open Office.


That said, I've got an even bigger issue at the moment: I'm now unable to really access the internet from my room (I'm at a PC room at the moment). While that might actually be a positive point back home, I'm currently abroad in South Korea, and without a phone the internet is my lifeline here and back home. I'm wondering if anyone has a suggestion for my current issue; here's the situation:

I'm operating on a Local Area Connection (shared with the other students on my dorm floor), but I haven't encountered anyone else with issues, including my roommate. I, on the other hand, have been unable to access any site other than my school website (back in the US, and not everything) and webifyme.org (affiliated with Mozilla, it would seem). (From webifyme.org, I was able to sign into Facebook to "like" webifyme, but not actually to go there.) Also, I have been able to sign into Skype (though I haven't talked to anyone, as no one on my meager friends list is ever on, so I don't know if it'd really work or if it just says it will). So, it seems the connection is working fine, and the built-in troubleshooting would seem to confirm that diagnosis. Checking the Local Area Connection status shows that I'm getting IPv4 connectivity, not IPv6, in case that matters at all.

I haven't exactly tried every website out there, but all my usual haunts remain off-limits; or rather, when I try to open up Google, CoN, Hotmail, Grooveshark, my bank's website, etc., the page won't load: it's a simple white screen. In case it might be helpful, I jotted down a few notes I gleaned from Page Info: each of these sites comes up as "text/plain," rendered in "Quirks mode," containing all of "0 KB," and are "verified by: not specified." I don't know if any of that is useful, but it seemed different than the couple sites that did work (which came up as "text/html" and were, in the case of my school's website, rendered in "Standards compliance mode").

Now, given that nothing seems to be wrong with my connection, I immediately figured something is wrong with my Firewall settings. Now, I'm clearly a failure when it comes to tech issues and what not, but it seems that my Firewall setting already allows Firefox access and what not, so if you have any ideas on more specific issues I can check, I'm all ears.

One last item of note: while I was searching through my firewall settings (using Online Armor, btw), I noticed that Online Armor hadn't been able to receive updates, and the following message appears when I check it out: Auto Update Failed: Socket Error # 10054, Connection Reset by Peer. I've googled the term, but I haven't found anything that helps me figure out 1) if the issues are/could be related, and 2) how, in either case, to fix it.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.


Finally, given my obvious lack of technical knowledge, and my increasing frustration therewith, I'm wondering if any of you can recommend places/books/etc. that can help me gain some semblance of tech. literacy?

Seems like you're being blocked by something. Try disabling Online Armor or other firewall programs you may have such as Windows Defender?

--------------------

Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

I don't use any personal firewalls, so I can't say much about whether that might be the problem (if you have the same problem in your dorm or if you connect from somewhere else, it's probably the case).

Networking isn't my strong suit, either, but the information you're collecting might not really give any real help. I would suggest opening a Command Prompt and typing "ipconfig" to see what IPv4 you're getting. You can also try to use ping and tracert to check on the sites you visit most frequently, to see if there are any hiccups in locating these sites, and where they might be. For more information on that, check this page: http://help.expedient.com/general/ping_traceroute.shtml

If I were to make a blind guess, I would say that you're being assigned an IP by your school network that isn't working right, or for some reason your machine is configured with a static IP in Control Panel that doesn't match what is used on your network's gateway, or you're using static nameservers that could be doing the same thing. The results of the ipconfig would help determine that.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

Thanks again. I'm not exactly certain what the terminology you've used means, but I'll try them both and see what you think of the results.

Well, I did quite a bit of troubleshooting this evening, as per your advice; here are my results:

I went to Command Prompt and typed "ipconfig" and received the following return:

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix: [This line was blank]
Link-local IPv6 Address: fe80::10c4:a704:c796:e4a0%12
IPv4 Address: 117.123.33.201
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway: 117.123.33.1

[Etc. etc. ad nauseum (hence my not including the rest). Anyway, presumably I really just needed to retrieve the IPv4 Address (and thus, my IP address for later tasks), right?]

[I do wonder about seeing those IPv6 Addresses; do the presence of those addresses in my returns imply that I should be getting the connectivity (connectivity that I'm not getting) from IPv6, or is it more that those would be the addresses I'd use were I not currently going through my ethernet's IPv4 address?]

Anyway, moving on:

I then tested the pinging of 127.0.0.1: the returns were as the guide expects.

I then pinged my own IP Address [the IPv4 Address I retrieved from "ipconfig", anyway]: again, the returns were as the guide expects.

I then pinged 209.166.161.121 to test my internet connection: once again, all normal.

I then pinged a few sites, including my school's homepage, CoN, and my email service: once again, all normal.

[Since I had no problems pinging any of these sites/IP addresses, does that mean that the problem doesn't lie in my DNS settings, or am I jumping the gun?]

After all that pinging, I tried "tracert" and got the following results:

1. On my school's website (of which I can freely navigate several sections, such as course planning and Blackboard<--though that one may actually lie outside BYU's website): anyway, over 25 hops, only two sites had dropped or lost packets [and only in the middle terms of their returns]

2. @ Hotmail: over 16 hops, no lost or dropped packets

3. @ Tumblr: over 20 hops, no lost or dropped packets

4. @ Facebook: over 19 hops, no lost or dropped packets

5. @CoN: over 19 hops, no lost or dropped packets

6. @ 211.169.245.170 [nsc.i-dns.net]: no trouble over 9 hops, but then the rest, up until the limit of 30 were asterisks <--I tried this one after looking up DNS servers and thinking that the DNS servers shown by the guide's reference probably weren't going to be what I needed; anyway, this is the DNS server for Seoul, South Korea. That said, I still don't really know what a DNS server is, and how it could/will be useful to me.

Basically, I still have no idea what to do next; the guide shows what to do if one gets obviously-skewed results, but mine seem to be functioning properly.

Again, thank you for your assistance. I truly appreciate it.

This post has been edited by Kane on 11th September 2011 12:07

Sounds to me like you've got a firewall or proxy blocking access to certain websites.

Thanks to everyone who replied.

After all that ordeal, I ended up uninstalling and replacing my firewall and antivirus software, and that action appears to have solved the issue. Huzzah!