Office 2010beta beware!

I liked Office 2010 and the free beta version seemed to last for ages. But all good things must end, someone said, and one day I realised I was back in Office 2007. That was OK as I hadn't got a spare £100 and wouldn't be able to get a free copy from College for a while.

A little while ago I was trying to print the final version of my huge great MA paper and the air had already turned blue just drafting it all. It became a purple haze Jimi Hendrix would've been proud of, though, when I tried printing it. Pages of nothing flew out of the printer. Now I know some people might say I write a load of poppycock but at least you can see poppycock. And anyway, that's for Middlesex University to decide.

Now, I admit that I did run the cartridges down to their last droplets and the level indicator showed just a thin line along the bottom and that was my first thought as to what was wrong. Replaced them. Same problem. Next I wondered whether the printer's drivers had got either corrupted in a strange way or one of my children had plugged and uplugged the thing and it had had some sort of coronary or brain damage. Installed new drivers. The old ones were 2004 vintage and the new were dated at around the time Office 2007 with its nice new Cambria, Calibri et al arrived. That must be it, I thought to myself and hit print once more. Still nothing.

Strangely, I could print PDFs fine so I did that to get the work off in time. I look for some answers on Google and the excellent Woody's Lounge. No-one else seemed to have had the problem. I even used one of those Just Answer type sites and some nice guy from the States had a go but gave up.

I did notice on my travels through the US Microsoft site that there was a trial version of Office 2010 available. No money to pay, no credit card, just download and away I go. That seemed a good idea anyway and maybe that would solve the problem. It did! For a while anyway.

On the way through installation it instructed me to uninstall 2010beta manually. I did that and now all the fonts print just fine.

What I don't know is whether all I need to have done was uninstall 2010beta. It would be pretty strange if I had to uninstall 2010 to get 2007 fonts back but it was, in fact, a suggestion from one of the leading Office guys on the planet who did reply on Woody's Lounge. Even he wasn't sure, though.

So, for the odd few people who had 2010beta but couldn't afford the upgrade and who now have the same problem, do give the uninstall thing a go and let me know.

Incidentally, I didn't see an equivalent free trial on the UK site.

Office 2007 Ultimate for £12.95

Now, as regular readers will know, I've been more than content with Office 97 for getting on for ten years. You get pretty familiar with software, for better or worse, when you've been wed to it for that long and I'm still finding things I didn't realise Word97 or Excel97 could do. It was such a huge relief too, after the hassles of teaching in a combination of Word6, 7 and 95. A mere £12.95, however, could get someone on a course with a .ac.uk e-mail address the full 2007 pack for a year or, probably the better deal, £39 for a full licence.

That's a remarkable figure. £39 vs £600 retail!

The offer's intended for students. The .ac.uk restriction will, unfortunately, exclude many and strikes me as a mistake as I know of many genuine students who are not provided with college e-mail accounts in these days of everyone having a perfectly adequate account of their own or using communication facilities within VLEs like moodle. Microsoft also state that the course should be at least 0.5 which I believe means requiring attendance, or study, for at least two and a half days a week during semesters or terms.

It's worth enrolling on something for that deal. Big Blue Brother reserves the right to check your entitlement and, for that sort of discount, I'm inclined the say that's reasonable enough.

Even if you can't figure a way to get eligible, do tell your students.

Here's the link to full details.