Why does Office 2007 no longer run on Windows 10?

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I have used MS Office 2007 (Home and Student) successfully for many years and wish to stick with it. Until a few months ago, it worked fine with Windows 10, but then refused to open either Word or Excel. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it, as I still have the disk, but to no avail.  I’ve also tried all the various Compatibility options I can manage.

I suspect this may have to do with a Win10 update, perhaps around mid-2018, but Idon’t know which.

Although LibreOffice and InkOffice, OpenOffice, and Softmaker FreeOffice2018 are all reasonable alternatives, they each have a limitation or two* and I’d prefer to stick with the version I’m familiar with.  *(I expect I could find a workaround for most of them, but for example, FreeOffice 2018 PlanMaker won’t save *.xls files, and others have a maximum number of arguments for functions I used, while Paste Special from my online bank statements won’t convert £10 to 10, only to ‘£10.)

Can anyone suggest a way of resurrecting Office 2007, please?

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type winver.exe on the command prompt (or Run dialog box) to determine the version & edition of Windows 10 used on your computer and perhaps post a screenshot (or image) of it here.

the office 2007 professional suite (w/ service pack 3) works on my Win10 computer (though I was using the 1607 version). do realize that support for all versions of office 2007 ended in October 2017 and no more new updates are made for them.

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I have Windows 10 Home,  Version 1809 (OS Build 17763.316).

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I recall seeing something recently about issues with Office 2007 in Win10, but I’m unable to find it right now, sorry.

I can see that Office 2017 became EOL in October 2017, but that as of 4 months ago, was considered to be able to work on Win10, with the note that:

… Office 2007 is no longer supported.
In reality, you currently probably won’t run into any compatibility issues but future updates to Windows 10 might cause it to break since Office 2007 is no longer taken into consideration.

Office 2010 also has a limited life, with October 13, 2020, being its last date for security updates.

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I cannot answer your questions about MS Office, but as a (paid for) Softmaker Office 2012 user I save Excel-like spreadsheets in MS .xls format.

Now this is not the free version, but Softmaker often offer previous versions of their paid for products as freebies. A quick search shows 2 current links for Softmaker 2016 (their previous version) which seem to be available at present:

https://sharewareonsale.com/s/softmaker-office-giveaway-coupon-sale

https://www.buzz99.com/softmaker-office-free/

This may be a better alternative than their Freeoffice 2018 product?

To set the default formats used, from the drop-down menu select ‘Tools > Options > System > Associate File Types’ and you may need to select ‘Save As’ and pick the correct format the 1st time you save a spreadsheet. You need to do this for each of PlanMaker, TextMaker etc. separately.

They need an e-mail address to send the licence to (which seems to be usual for German companies), but are restrained in e-mailing afterwards. I get maybe a handful each year with cut-price offers for their current products.

BTW: When installing I suggest selecting the Custom option and de-selecting the e-mail client Thunderbird if you already have it or don’t want it as an Outlook alternative or don’t want the Softmaker-specific options.

HTH. Garbo.

 

2 users thanked author for this post.

Pool Lounger 2, Cybertooth

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Thanks, anonymous, for your suggestions.

I’ll keep trying to get MS Office 2007 working, but I’ll also look at the Softmaker 2016 you recommend. Good idea!

OP

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Office 2007 should run on Windows 10. Have you checked the application event log or the system event log after Word or Excel fails?

--Joe

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Hi, Joe. Sounds like a good idea.

Could you point me to how I find these two logs, please?

OP

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Right click the Start Menu (windows) button, then click on “Event Viewer”. When Event Viewer opens it will show you a summary of recent events in various categories. You may click the plus (+) next to “Errors” to see a list by group. If you double click a group that group will open showing you the individual entries. You can use the back navigation arrow to return to the summary. If you wish to go through the application event log by itself click on “Windows Logs” in the left navigation pane and then double click on “Application” to open the log.

--Joe

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I have MS Office 2007 Home and Student running in Windows 10 Pro 1809 (build 17763.348).

Just because my Win 10 is Pro and yours is Home should make no difference at all. Mine’s right up-to-date and one minor build release newer but otherwise almost identical… so I know Office 2007 runs OK in 1809:

What happens if you run Microsoft Office Diagnostics from the Start > Microsoft Office menu?

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but is your Office 2007 suite updated to at least SP3 level, Rick?

my cousin’s old HP laptop had Office 2007 home & student edition pre-installed on his laptop (and there were no Office 2007 CDs provided for it, so his was an OEM/trial edition and not the “full” version installed from a CD)

OP needs to update Office 2007 with Service Pack 3 first and install the latest available security updates to Office 2007.

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Good point, @EP.

I updated the Office 2007 install to the latest SP3 (SP3 appears to have been issue a couple of times) and it’s still opening and working fine.

The MS ‘Install Office Updates’ web page states:

If you are looking for updates, Support has ended for Office 2007.

Following a link it shows that:

Support for Office 2007 ended on October 10, 2017.

As a result, isn’t it unlikely that an MS update in the last few months (according to the OP) has caused a problem?

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Hi, Rick. Good idea, I thought.

I tried Microsoft Office Diagnostics from the Start menu, and I could pin it to the Task Bar (but nothing happened when I clicked on it) or I could find the location of its shortcut (C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office\Microsoft Office Tools), but the shortcut didn’t run and didn’t point anywhere, just saying its Target is Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007. I thought this might mean the CD, which I inserted, but the shortcut still didn’t find it.

Sorry! Any more ideas?  OP

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A couple of further thoughts:

1) You wrote that Office 2007 “refused to open either Word or Excel”. How were you trying to “open” Word and Excel? I guess most people double click on a .doc or .xls file and the file association mechanism opens the program. Is this what you mean by “open”? If it is, have you tried opening Word and Excel using the right mouse button “Open With” option and selecting the program from the list?

Have you tried opening Word and Excel directly from the Start menu, launch bar, desktop icon  or running the executable directly and then opeing the file from inside the program (using ‘File > Open’ from the program menu)?

If this works, then maybe it is just the file association mechanism which has become broken. There have been file association problems with earlier versions of W10 and this might be a track to follow.

2) I only have a passing interest in W10. Every few months I update a system partition, with a few 3rd party programs I use, on a spare disk drive, just in case I ever need to use W10 in the future. After my last update to W10 1809 in late February I discovered that the downloading and installing Edge extensions via the Store mechanism did not work. With nothing to lose (it was on a spare disk and I made a system partition backup beforehand) and still having the W10 1809 .iso on a USB memory stick I re-installed 1809 on top of the 1809 already installed. After this the Edge extension mechanism works fine. Clearly the W10 feature update/re-installation mechanism is not always 100% reliable.

So you write that you tried re-installing Office 2007 without success, but after making a system partition backup in case W10 re-installation creates even more problems than you have now, you could try re-installing your version of W10 again to see if this fixes your problem.

HTH. Garbo.

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Pool Lounger 2

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Hi Garbo.
You wrote:”Have you tried opening Word and Excel directly from the Start menu, launch bar, desktop icon  or running the executable directly and then opeing the file from inside the program (using ‘File > Open’ from the program menu)?”

Yes, tried all those. If there’s any problem with file associations, I find that runnng the executable directly usually sorts that out, as you say.
For example, C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\Excel.exe, or Winword.exe. Neither will run, even if I use the Compatibility Troubleshooter.”

As for “making a system partition backup in case W10 re-installation creates even more problems”, I’ll have to do some homework to see how to do that. Good idea, though.
Thanks! OP

Edit to remove HTML. Please use the “Text” tab in the entry box when you copy/paste.

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I have several versions of Office running on Win10, 2013, 2010, 2007 and 2000.  Office 2000 is on a Win10 IP/Insider Preview machine.  I don’t use older version of Outlook as I assume that would be where most issues would occur, mostly based on the historic experience of Office 97’s version of Outlook being quickly  replaced by Outlook 98.

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Well… if it works for other people, then maybe consider:

MS Office, pretty much all versions, apparently stores various amounts of data in the user profile. This data may in some cases become corrupted which can cause all kinds of weird problems. Seen Outlook failing to start, for example. And, user profile data isn’t cleared on application removal and reinstall.

If you’d, say, create a new user profile, reboot and log into that, and then see if Office applications work or not… well at least you could rule out user profile issues if it still doesn’t work? (Reboot because I’ve seen in-memory copies make trouble with this kind of thing)

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Pool Lounger 2

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That sounds like a good idea, mn-.
I’ll give it a try!  OP

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Have you tried a repair of Office from control panel Programs & Features? Have had issues similar to yours with many versions of Office and that has fixed it almost every time.

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Pool Lounger 2 wrote:

Hi, Rick. Good idea, I thought. I tried Microsoft Office Diagnostics from the Start menu, and I could pin it to the Task Bar (but nothing happened when I clicked on it) or I could find the location of its shortcut (C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office\Microsoft Office Tools), but the shortcut didn’t run and didn’t point anywhere, just saying its Target is Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007. I thought this might mean the CD, which I inserted, but the shortcut still didn’t find it. Sorry! Any more ideas? OP

On my Win 10 1809 laptop the Office 2007 Diagnostics executable is located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\OFFICE12\OFFDIAG.EXE.

If you can also find it installed there, try opening Task Manager and change to the Details tab. Swap back to the OFFICE12 folder and double-click on OFFDIAG.EXE. Does it appear as a running process in Task Manager’s Details tab? If not, what happens if you right-click on OFFDIAG.EXE and choose Run as administrator?

(If it’s not installed as C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\OFFICE12\OFFDIAG.EXE then that would suggest it’s an installation issue.)

Hope this helps…

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