Fix - Outlook Express needs to compact disk space.

To free up disk space outlook express can compact messages. Problem is, you don’t even have Outlook Express installed! What’s going on?

This problem occurs if Outlook Express uses a third party search tool to index items on your hard drive. For our purposes we will say that you have Windows Search for your desktop. If you’re using Windows Search, right click the System Tray icon, select Windows Search Options. When the Indexing Options dialog box appears, click the Modify button at the bottom. Find Microsoft Outlook Express in the list, clear the check box, click OK. Microsoft Outlook Express should no longer appear in the “Index these locations:” list. Next, close the dialog box to finish.

By performing this method, Outlook Express should no longer try to index your hard drive and thus should not prompt you to compact your messages.

Repair MS Office

Sometimes Microsoft Office problems are just to weird and/or extreme for the home user or even IT professional to troubleshoot. In those cases it is sometimes necessary to reinstall your office program, for those cases of high corruption it may be best to try a repair install rather than trying to completely reinstall the entire Office Suite or product.

How to perform an MS Office repair.
*Note* Depending on your installation, you may need the MS Office disk to perform the repair.

 

Performing a repair is easy. You can repair a single Office product or repair the entire suite.

 

Repairing a single product…

• With your troubled product open (i.e. Outlook, Word), goto Tools > Repair .
• Your product will begin repairing program files, you may be asked for your disk during this process.
• When it has completed, you should restart your application and test the fix.

 

Repairing the Office Suite
To repair the Office Suite grab your MS Office disk and perform the following:

• Insert your MS Office disk.
• Goto Start > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Microsoft Office > Change
• Once you click Change, you will be prompted with a wizard that will guide you through the repair.
• Follow the on screen prompts to complete the repair process.

 

That is all there is to repairing your Office installations! It is important to note that this will NOT erase any settings or files associated with your MS product.

Opening Lotus Worksheets (.wk1) in Excel 2003 SP3

If you have recently applied the service pack 3 patch sent out by Microsoft, then you may not be able to open Lotus worksheets that were previously accessible. Service pack 3 introduced a restriction on opening these file types without creating a setting for it in the registry. If you try to open a .wk1 file extension you may have received the following error message:

 

You are attempting to open a file type that is blocked by your registry policy setting.

 

The fix for this is simple. (but shouldn’t be necessary! -Microsoft-)
1. Click Start > Run and Type Regedit > Press Enter
2. Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Excel\Security\FileOpenBlock
3. If FileOpenBlock does not exists you will need to create it by highlighting the Security subkey and on the Edit menu, selecting New > Key
4. Type FileOpenBlock and Press Enter
5. Point to New on the Edit menu, and then click DWORD Value.
6. Type the DWORD name that you want to restrict, and then press ENTER. In this case type LotusandQuattroFiles
7. Right-click the DWORD name that you typed in step 6, and then click Modify.
8. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
9. On the File menu, click Exit to exit Registry Editor.

 

By adding a DWORD value of 0 for the LotusandQuattroFiles name, you are forcing acceptance of those file types in MS Excel. If you want to restrict those file types in the future, simply change the DWORD value to 1.

 

The following table contains the DWORD names that an administrator can add to the registry to restrict certain file types by using the FileOpenBlock subkey. Additionally, the table contains the corresponding file types that are restricted.