Office 2007 installation glitch

I’ve been through a few Office upgrades, and I’m used to simply running the new installation program and having my old Office versions replaced automatically. That didn’t work when I installed the trial version of Office 2007. Most components of the suite installed just fine, but not Outlook 2007.

I ended up with two versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Publisher, but only Outlook 2003. I tried uninstalling Outlook 2003 — which was listed separately in Add/Remove Programs — but I still couldn’t get Outlook 2007 installed. Finally I uninstalled the rest of Office 2003. At that point I was able to re-run the Office 2007 installation and use the Add or Remove Features option to add Outlook 2007.

I’m not sure why the Office 2007 installation failed in the first place. I think it may go back to the installation of Office 2003. When I set up my desktop, I installed Outlook 2003 as part of the Small Business Server 2003 client setup program, before installing the rest of Office. That meant that Outlook got installed to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Outlook instead of C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office. When I installed the rest of Office, I wasn’t paying close enough attention, and the rest of the suite got installed to C:\Program Files\Outlook as well. Perhaps that unusual file location is what got the Office 2007 installation confused.

Anyway, the point here is that if you’re having trouble getting Office 2007 installed properly, try uninstalling all Office 2003 components first. For a bunch of articles about Office 2007 setup troubleshooting, click here.