How to best communicate with Microsoft about the difficulties of uninstalling the 2007 Office system

[Sam Bryan]

This is meant to be constructive criticism. An attempt to help people in the future not to have to go through what I've just gone through.

Any suggestions on how to best get Microsoft's attention regarding the 2007 Office uninstall situation? It took several hours and was fraught with difficulties.

I am running Windows XP SP3 and using Office Small Business 2007.

Here is sthe ituation I experienced, which I expect has happened in some variation to 1,000's of others.

* I had to reinstall Windows XP due to a non-office problem
* After reinstall of XP, when tried to run Office Word for example, get error message that said need to run Setup
* Was not clear what Setup meant. It became clear that I would need to do an uninstall before doing a reinstall.
* Using Install CD, tried running Repair. Failed. Tried running Remove. Failed.
* At Control Panel tried Add/Remove Program for Office 2007. Failed.
* Went to Microsoft support online and found the 6-page description on what to do when cannot uninstall Office 2007 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928218/en-us
* I went through this once, requiring several hours, but for whatever reason it failed. On this very helpful newsgroup someone suggested I might have had an older office suite around. I did have
some modules of Office 1997 and I did uninstall that.
* I tried again last night following the 928218 article from Microsoft, spending several hours and this time it worked. Perhaps it was the old office suite "interference".

Between attempts at using the 928218 procedure I purchased a commercial program that claimed to be able to automatically uninstall 2007 Office. It did not see 2007 Office on my system I assume because the first
attempt at using the 928218 procedure probably removed some key files or registry entries that it was looking for.

So I have had a huge expenditure of time and frustration and all of the attending indirect costs of projects being put on hold. The 928218 procedure has many steps, some involving deletions of registry items. And it is
very time consuming. Step 5, substep 4 for example required the examination of the properties of 440 items!

One way of looking at this is that the Microsoft software - 1. The Remove software on the install CD and 2. The Add/Remove Program on the Control Panel - has serious bugs. They failed.
Bugs that Microsoft has not addressed. With the office suite being their flagship product and there being millions of copies out there, their lack of addressing this seems incomprehensible from a business standpoint. And reprehensible from the standpoint of the lack of concern it shows for its customers. I wonder how many man-years have been expended by people like me who have run into this problem?

Given that Microsoft has not fixed the bugs mentioned above, why are they not providing a removal tool that is available online, that automates the manual algorithm of 928218? Many people are not going to spend the time
I did to do the manual uninstall or will not know how to follow the instruction or will not be willing to edit the registry, and could not be blamed for abandoning the office suite in favor the other options out there.

It did not strike me as promising to spend $59 for Midcosoft telephone technical support since I'd likely be told to go through the steps again.

So again -- any suggestions from this newsgroup on how to effectively get Microsoft's attention with this? Having a remedy will be a big favor to many people.

Thanks for considering this. If anyone thinks I've misrepresented the situation, please weigh in on that. Or if you have had similar experiences, you might add that to the thread. Presumably someone at Microsoft looks at these messages.
If you are from Microsoft, one way to look at this is we are trying to help you be a better company.

-- Sam

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Hi, Sam,

That's got to be frustrating...and it's great that you are willing to take
the time to post constructive criticism and your frustrations here. As you
note, there have been lots of similar posts.

Not all of us are comfortable re-installing our systems because of a bum
installation.

The manual removal is cumbersome, but at least it's there...there have been
earlier versions where this wasn't provided, and it's useful to have all the
details. Automation would be great, though it's always dangerous to automate
stuff when you don't know the configuration of everyone's particular system,
and the risk of toasting something is pretty high. However, it would be
great if the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility (a much-used utility to
remove Windows Installer info related to installations of earlier versions
of Office) would be updated to support Office 2007. (It's not currently
recommended for 2007. It is used for cleanup of bad installer information so
that you can do a clean installation, and it has generally been pretty
successful--not completely, but generally--on previous versions of Office).

That said, this is a pretty good forum, as there are people here who have
direct contact with the product groups at Microsoft (at varying levels), and
there are some Microsoft employees who occasionally come out here and check
out what's going on in the community.

I'd imagine that if they saw hundreds of "yes, me, too!!!" responses to a
constructive post, that would be a powerful thing.

--
Susan Ramlet
**please reply to the newsgroup so others may benefit**


This is meant to be constructive criticism. An attempt to help people in the
future not to have to go through what I've just gone through.

Any suggestions on how to best get Microsoft's attention regarding the 2007
Office uninstall situation? It took several hours and was fraught with
difficulties.

I am running Windows XP SP3 and using Office Small Business 2007.

Here is sthe ituation I experienced, which I expect has happened in some
variation to 1,000's of others.

* I had to reinstall Windows XP due to a non-office problem
* After reinstall of XP, when tried to run Office Word for example, get
error message that said need to run Setup
* Was not clear what Setup meant. It became clear that I would need to do an
uninstall before doing a reinstall.
* Using Install CD, tried running Repair. Failed. Tried running Remove.
Failed.
* At Control Panel tried Add/Remove Program for Office 2007. Failed.
* Went to Microsoft support online and found the 6-page description on what
to do when cannot uninstall Office 2007 -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928218/en-us
* I went through this once, requiring several hours, but for whatever reason
it failed. On this very helpful newsgroup someone suggested I might have had
an older office suite around. I did have
some modules of Office 1997 and I did uninstall that.
* I tried again last night following the 928218 article from Microsoft,
spending several hours and this time it worked. Perhaps it was the old
office suite "interference".

Between attempts at using the 928218 procedure I purchased a commercial
program that claimed to be able to automatically uninstall 2007 Office. It
did not see 2007 Office on my system I assume because the first
attempt at using the 928218 procedure probably removed some key files or
registry entries that it was looking for.

So I have had a huge expenditure of time and frustration and all of the
attending indirect costs of projects being put on hold. The 928218 procedure
has many steps, some involving deletions of registry items. And it is
very time consuming. Step 5, substep 4 for example required the examination
of the properties of 440 items!

One way of looking at this is that the Microsoft software - 1. The Remove
software on the install CD and 2. The Add/Remove Program on the Control
Panel - has serious bugs. They failed.
Bugs that Microsoft has not addressed. With the office suite being their
flagship product and there being millions of copies out there, their lack of
addressing this seems incomprehensible from a business standpoint. And
reprehensible from the standpoint of the lack of concern it shows for its
customers. I wonder how many man-years have been expended by people like me
who have run into this problem?

Given that Microsoft has not fixed the bugs mentioned above, why are they
not providing a removal tool that is available online, that automates the
manual algorithm of 928218? Many people are not going to spend the time
I did to do the manual uninstall or will not know how to follow the
instruction or will not be willing to edit the registry, and could not be
blamed for abandoning the office suite in favor the other options out there.

It did not strike me as promising to spend $59 for Midcosoft telephone
technical support since I'd likely be told to go through the steps again.

So again -- any suggestions from this newsgroup on how to effectively get
Microsoft's attention with this? Having a remedy will be a big favor to many
people.

Thanks for considering this. If anyone thinks I've misrepresented the
situation, please weigh in on that. Or if you have had similar experiences,
you might add that to the thread. Presumably someone at Microsoft looks at
these messages.
If you are from Microsoft, one way to look at this is we are trying to help
you be a better company.

-- Sam

 

[Meg]

This is meant to be constructive criticism. An attempt to help people in the future not to have to go through what I've just gone through.

Any suggestions on how to best get Microsoft's attention regarding the 2007 Office uninstall situation? It took several hours and was fraught with difficulties.

I am running Windows XP SP3 and using Office Small Business 2007.

Here is sthe ituation I experienced, which I expect has happened in some variation to 1,000's of others.

* I had to reinstall Windows XP due to a non-office problem
* After reinstall of XP, when tried to run Office Word for example, get error message that said need to run Setup
* Was not clear what Setup meant. It became clear that I would need to do an uninstall before doing a reinstall.
* Using Install CD, tried running Repair. Failed. Tried running Remove. Failed.
* At Control Panel tried Add/Remove Program for Office 2007. Failed.
* Went to Microsoft support online and found the 6-page description on what to do when cannot uninstall Office 2007 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928218/en-us
* I went through this once, requiring several hours, but for whatever reason it failed. On this very helpful newsgroup someone suggested I might have had an older office suite around. I did have
some modules of Office 1997 and I did uninstall that.
* I tried again last night following the 928218 article from Microsoft, spending several hours and this time it worked. Perhaps it was the old office suite "interference".

Between attempts at using the 928218 procedure I purchased a commercial program that claimed to be able to automatically uninstall 2007 Office. It did not see 2007 Office on my system I assume because the first
attempt at using the 928218 procedure probably removed some key files or registry entries that it was looking for.

So I have had a huge expenditure of time and frustration and all of the attending indirect costs of projects being put on hold. The 928218 procedure has many steps, some involving deletions of registry items. And it is
very time consuming. Step 5, substep 4 for example required the examination of the properties of 440 items!

One way of looking at this is that the Microsoft software - 1. The Remove software on the install CD and 2. The Add/Remove Program on the Control Panel - has serious bugs. They failed.
Bugs that Microsoft has not addressed. With the office suite being their flagship product and there being millions of copies out there, their lack of addressing this seems incomprehensible from a business standpoint. And reprehensible from the standpoint of the lack of concern it shows for its customers. I wonder how many man-years have been expended by people like me who have run into this problem?

Given that Microsoft has not fixed the bugs mentioned above, why are they not providing a removal tool that is available online, that automates the manual algorithm of 928218? Many people are not going to spend the time
I did to do the manual uninstall or will not know how to follow the instruction or will not be willing to edit the registry, and could not be blamed for abandoning the office suite in favor the other options out there.

It did not strike me as promising to spend $59 for Midcosoft telephone technical support since I'd likely be told to go through the steps again.

So again -- any suggestions from this newsgroup on how to effectively get Microsoft's attention with this? Having a remedy will be a big favor to many people.

Thanks for considering this. If anyone thinks I've misrepresented the situation, please weigh in on that. Or if you have had similar experiences, you might add that to the thread. Presumably someone at Microsoft looks at these messages.
If you are from Microsoft, one way to look at this is we are trying to help you be a better company.

-- Sam


Thank you for an intelligent post dealing with this issue. I have spent many hours in the past 12 months, since I made the horrible error of trying Office 2007, to remove it and use Office 2003. No matter how many attempts I make, I CANNOT stop the Windows Installer from popping up and freezing Office 2003 when I attempt to use it.

I am going to format the computer next month just to get the virus-like
Office 2007 off my computer. It's a shame to be unable to work because you
cannot remove an office suite, yet I tried to learn Office 2007 for six
months, and just couldn't do it.

 

[Sam Bryan]

Susan I appreciate your thoughtful reply . And I appreciate the good
Samaritans on this group. It's great
that people who are basically strangers take time to help others.

A couple of comments though.

I notice there are not a lot of "me too" additions to this thread. But I
hope it won't take a lynch mob to
have Microsoft invest in making the situation better. As you said there have
been many cases similar to mine that
have already been reported. It should be clear to Microsoft that they have a
problem.

I understand what you are saying about the difficulties with having a
universal uninstall tool, but with all
of Microsoft's programming resources isn't it a reasonable expectation that
those are difficulties that could be overcome?

Office must be a multi-billion dollar product for them. I think they are
putting it at risk. Out of desperation
I installed an alternative office suite and it met most, but not all of my
needs.

They are also at risk for a PR problem I think if the word gets out that
they do not have an automated removal tool for Office. The average
person, to some extent rightfully so, must wonder just how hard is it to
remove a program? In the DOS days
you would just do a delete. And the word can get out. Things go viral these
days. Microsoft really needs to get
out in front of this before they get Youtube'd. Spending hours and hundreds
of mouse clicks just to get rid of
something would be pretty easy to dramatize.

Maybe you can do some consciousness raising with them.

Thanks again for your response.

Sam

 

[Susan Ramlet]

Well, the "uninstall" is supposed to be the automated removal tool...which
doesn't always work as intended (obviously).

I also have Open Office installed on one of my systems and I like it a lot.
I think it meets most of everyone's needs for the most common functionality,
and it's hard pass up "free"...I think it's better than an alternative of
desperation; it's pretty viable, frankly. Not quite as elegant, and not all
the advanced functions, but pretty darned viable. Plus, I like the whole
open source concept.

That said, I also really like MS Office, and it would be great if the
matters most complained about get some attention here. In my past dealings
with folks from Microsoft, I think there are a lot of really smart people
who have way too many priorities and PR issues to deal with. I think they
really want to work through all these issues (which is why these forums
exist and why you will see people from Microsoft come out here periodically)
but have the overhead of a monstrous organization to wade through. (I work
for a monstrous organization as well, so I have similar challenges in
getting things done--even the things everyone knows are right...)

Not excuses, just discussion. Rally the troops.

 

[Sam Bryan]

Thanks Susan for weighing in on this.

Microsoft I hope you are listening. You can really help the average user
(don't they constitite the bulk of your Office market?) by providing an
easy-to-use, effective removal tool for Office for those cases in which it
needs to be reinstalled. For the average user not needing some of the more
powerful features of Office there are other alternatives out there. I'm sure
there are challenges in a complex OS environment to creating a bullet-proof
removal tool, but surely it is doable. It is also not to your credit that
the Repair/Rmove options on your install disc when they fail, just say
"Fail" without saying why and without any suggestions for remedial action.
Likewise for the Add/Remove program on the Control Panel. You can be a
better company.

-- Sam