Right, I promised myself that I would not revert to being a rant blogger in order to get attention. Hence I will keep this as rant free as possible, and as an added bonus I will keep it informative as well – so you could maybe learn something helpful.

Some of you may well have run into this problem, and I will describe it shortly here:

When installing Microsoft Office 2007 on a Microsoft Windows XP computer, your Microsoft Outlook Express 6 e-mail client will only be able to spellcheck in French.

Now you noticed that I used the word “Microsoft” quite a few times in the above sentence. The reason for that is this: only Microsoft products are involved in, and responsible for, the problem of French spellchecking being the only option available henceforth.

It turns out that Microsoft Office 2007 uses newer “Proofing Tools” that are not compatible with Outlook Express. Joy.

Now, here is the solution, provided by Microsoft themselves. I decided to call them to find a solution, simply because what I found online made no sense.

Here, ladies and gentlegeeks, is your fix.

And I quote almost verbatim from the very helpful – and no sarcasm there, if there is one thing that I can say for MS is that they really have excellent call-center staff – young lady who helped me:

“You can buy the correct proofing tools from any computer store…”

Here is the gotcha. To fix a problem created by Microsoft products not working together, you need to pay for the correct proofing tools.

That is option number one.

I present thee with option number two:

Take a Microsoft Office 2003 disk, insert the disk and install the proofing tools off it. This seems simpler, and if you had an office 2003 disk lying around it would be a great fix. But there is a catch: If you don’t have an Office 2003 disk you are reverted back to option 1, or if you can get hold of a Office 2003 disk you need a valid key code to use it.

Now for us as a service provider, we need to take one of our provided Office 2003 disks, go to the client, use one of our provided licenses (if we had one, otherwise we would need to purchase one specifically for this job) and fix the clients installation.

The Microsoft help desk consultant assured me that activation of this key would not be necessary and that we would be able to sell it to another client afterwards.

I have one issue with this: apparently we have some OEM licenses lying around, for now. For how long will we be able to buy Office 2003 licenses? Which of our clients will want to buy Office 2003 when Office 2007 is available in its Outlook Express breaking glory.

Since we have OEM Licenses I am sure we will be able to keep one aside for that purpose, but for Joe Average – sorry bud, mo’ cash… mo’ cash…

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