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I have no idea how much they charge anymore, but AccessData Corp. is pretty good. they sell packages now when years ago they used to sell password revovery software for individual programs with Excel being their best seller. You could always find out how much.

Thank you Rebel. I could not find that link even though I tried for about an hour. Microsoft tries very hard to not make it easy for you. I don’t know about the two computer installation thing, but my copies say licensed for 1 computer. That’s besides the point as I do not have a portable computer. According to your link, it won’t do any good to post the phone number so I won’t. Thanks again.

You’re right Hans – there’s little that we can do about it. I’m just a bit upset and angry that I have to go through all this. When I do go through the process of reactivating, I’ll come back here and post the phone number.

I sent off an e-mail to the Microsoft Corporate Office describing this problem. The response that came back was almost incoherent. I did, however, garner out of their mostly “canned” response a link that refers to another link which states that in the event of a significent hardware change (new computer?) the software requires that you reactivate it. At that point you should be able to find a phone number that eventually gets to a human who may solve the problem. That number is not available until you go through this process. Boy, is this ever so user friendly!

The software products in question are “upgrades” since I have been using Microsoft products for about 20 years now. That should not matter at all. Upgrades are equally “activatable” as are “full” packages per Microsoft’s advertising. This activation process is relatively new in the scheme of things. Not that it matters but, I have three versions of Microsoft Office actively operating on two computers. One version, the Office and Student 2007 has three licenses so it’s not a current problem, but should I move on to other computers, it will be. My Office 2003 is used for different things than my Office 2007 Professional and both are on my main computer. The codes that you are referring to are only good when you re-install the software on the same computer, not move it to a new computer. Moving the software requires reactivation. The problem is that once the product has been activated on one computer you cannot activate it again on a new computer without some form of Microsoft intervention. It’s that intervention that I would like to be able to do in advance.

“When the on line activation fails”

That’s the part that really ticks me off. Why should it have to fail? Why isn’t there a way to set this up in advance? Also, there are no phone numbers in the “documentation” that came with Office 2007. Anyway, I find it hard to believe that no one else has ever gone through this and would know what to do. Does Microsoft actually believe that people don’t upgrade their computers? This whole situation is just plain stupid.

That may be the way I have to wind up doing it, but Microsoft has no phone numbers for this process. The closest that I could find is a technical service line which involves laying out $49 before you can even talk to anyone. Surely there is another way.

Both suites were purchased over the counter. You cannot merely install the software on another computer because Microsoft assumes that it’s one copy on two computers even though the software is removed from the older computer. The activation process will not accept the new installation unless something “special” is done. It’s that “special” thing that I don’t know about.

Hans –

Sorry for not responding before this. Yes the rest of the words etc., in the diaglog box are identical. I did not have the “Ignore Other Applications” box checked. It is now. It seems to work now as it is suppose to. When I double-click an Excel file, it opens up Excel 2003 and then the selected document without any error messages. Thank you Hans for your patience and knowledge.

IrishLefty

Thanks guys. It’s getting a lot closer, but there is still a small problem. My latest “Application used to perform action” is: “H:Office 2003OFFICE11EXCEL.EXE” “%1” That does indeed open the selected file without the unrecognized file names error messages and with a space in the folder name. It, however, now brings up a different error message that incidentally is incorrect and that is: “SELECTED_FILE.XLS is already open. Reopening will cause any changes you made to be discarded. Do you want to reopen SELECTED_FILE.XLS?” YES / NO. Note that only one copy of my SELECTED_FILE.XLS file is actually open. That error I can live with because regardless of what I click, YES or NO, the error message goes away and things are back to normal. Oh well.

Hans –

There are no quote marks around the %1. Here’s what I have:

“H:Office 2003OFFICE11EXCEL.EXE” %1

Another interesting thing is that when I use Excel 2007 as my intended program, it doesn’t care about the spaces. Only when both are there, and I attempt to open a file with Excel 2003 by double clicking it , does this problem occur. My conclusion is that Excel 2007 altered a common command file that is used to open saved Excel files. Why? I have no idea.

Well, it has been mostly solved. Turns out that when you load Office 2007 on your computer while retaining Office 2003, one of the “shared” commands is different in 2007 than it was in 2003. I haven’t been able to figure out which command nor why, but here’s what happens. When you have only Office 2003 (or any other version I presume) on your computer and you double-click on an Excel file, it correctly reads the folder that you are currently in. If, however, you have both versions 2003 and 2007 installed, the later version’s method of identifying your current open folder is different than the earlier version’s. Excel 2007 apparently handles spaces in your folder’s name differently that 2003 does. The error messages I mentioned earlier were that it could not find the folder “My” and than “Documents” etc. on down the line. I edited my “My Documents” folder to remove the space such that it’s now “MyDocuments.” I then went into Excel and selected Tools / Options / General and edited the Default File Location path to remove the space in My Documents and now it works as advertised. Learn something new every day.

Thank you Hans for your responses. The Tools / Options / General path is correct as it is. I have always assumed that the T / O / G path is a one-way street from Excel to the files and that there is a different (hidden somewhere in the bowels) path from the files to Excel. Anyway, I’m just going to live with it the way it is as there does not seem to be a fix for it. Thank you again.

Sorry for the confusion. Earlier that was one of the Student versions of Office. I now have the full-blown Office Pro version. The problem wasn’t actually fixed before, but I worked around it by uninstalling the Student version of Office 11. Now that I have the full version, I want to solve it completely. When I do as you suggested before (and now) Excel 2003 does try to open up the document, but for some reason it takes a different path in its quest (via an old and non existant hard drive) and I get error message upon error message saying it cannot find the document, but eventually it does correctly open it. Why on earth would merely restoring Excel 2003 as the default program to open .XLS documents change how it looks for those documents? This makes no sense to me. I did at one time have my documents saved on that now non-existant harddrive, but that was several months ago. I was hoping for a different solution, but apparently one may not exist. Thank you for your response.

Yeah, I kind of figured that was the problem also. The darn thing ran just fine for a couple of months before the “hijack” took place though. Thanks again for the help.