Emergency! Well sort of, can you help my daughter?

My daughter, who is working part time on her MBA at Boston U, uninstalled Office7 Beta today for some incompatibility issue she was having while working on a project. She had been using 7 Beta for several months and really liked it. She was using her companies lap top (XP Pro) and it also uninstalled MS Office. Apparently, the Beta must have installed over Office. Now she has no Word, Excel, etc. She tried doing an XP restore but it gave her the message (I paraphrase), there is nothing wrong with your computer, try an earlier restore point! Have any suggestions? My main question is: since she doesn't have the XP Disc, since it's a company computer and tech support is in Atlanta and she is in Boston, if she contacts MS and they see she has a valid copy of XP, would they give her a link to download Office? Thank You!

 

Microsoft Office isn't free software, no matter which Windows XP license your daughter has activated.

I guess this is not the right time to ask why she installed beta software on a company's computer.
Would installing the free Open Office be helpful?

 

Sun Office offered their Office Suite free within the last weekend or two. It looks like a really good alternative to MS Office.

 

From another site, a poster linked a 60 day trial of Office 2003 which seems to be working fine. This will get her through a busy week. Before informing her IT department she is going to cry to MS and see if that gets her anywhere. Apparently all of her important work things are in Outlook. Thanks all!

 

Hello,

Open Office, free.
http://www.openoffice.org/

Mrk

 

Extremely risky, since none of the alternatives such as Open Office or Star Office include support for Outlook data files.

Her best course of action would be to get the Student/Teacher version of Office, since that can be bought for much much less than the other full editions.

 

Actually, her best course of action is to contact her internal IT group, plead mea culpa, hope for the best, and never place another piece of beta software on a work PC.

If she is up and running now with a trial, she should spend some time collecting any and all potentially needed files (attachments, post office files, etc.) on an external HDD in the event someone mishandles things down the line (i.e. take the time to back things up NOW!)

Blue

 

Sometimes lessons are learned only the hard way.
No reason to feel sorry.

 

So, in the past month, three of us at work just got new Dells with XP Pro and our IT lady left the XP Pro Service Pack 2 Reinstallation CD. When my daughter comes for Christmas will we be able to reinstall Office with this CD? I assume it's part of Pro, right? Thank You!

 

No, that relates to the OS only.

Blue

 

Perhaps her company will FedEx over night her a personal copy of Office. Surely a copy of Office came with that company PC

 

It Microsoft Windows XP is your CD player, then Microsoft Office is your CD collection.
You need the player to listen to the CD's, but the CD's don't come free with the player.
Please, read this again until you understand it.

Technically speaking, I'm under the impression that your daughter and you create more problems than you solve.
Parental speaking, what's wrong with accountability these days? Your daughter made poor decissions, is she actually related to that company?

If you try to fix this with twists and tricks, what message do you send to your child
How does this playing around with software improve her grades, anyway

 

Give me a freaken brake mister know it all perfect! You obviously did not take reading comprehension!!!

 

To all:

Deep breath Please....let's keep to the technical discussion and ditch any further less than appropriate personal characterization comments.

Thanks,
Bubba

 

Very sound advice!

 

No, the Operating System (Windows XP Pro or Home edition) is a totally separate program from Microsoft Office (which has Excel, Word, Access, Power Point, Outlook). The Operating system software is on a separate CD than the Office software CD. Both programs have separate user license agreements. When you get a new PC, you usually have an Operating System preinstalled and you sometimes have a backup CD for that program. Microsoft Office programs are an optional software item on a lot of PCs. They are sometimes installed on systems already when purchased and you may get a backup CD for them (depends on the vendor). If the software was preinstalled and you don't have a backup copy, then you could go the route of using a trial version or going back to the vendor to get it reinstalled again. Going to Microsoft about the problem may not be of help. Hopefully, your daughter did not lose much of her saved work when she lost the program suite. If she did not backup her work, I am not sure if it would be recoverable should you install another replacement program copy.

 

The side of my brain that handles scheming is telling me that you have a few options.
1 look for replacement ie open office or shell out a fortune for microsoft.
2 contact the company and confess
3 contact the company and say that (insert excuse here)
3.i excuses include ... got virus, someone else installed it while i wasn't looking, I thought we were allowed to install work related software on the machine.