Outlook 2003 conflict

[David French]

I am having troubles with the Office Assistant with regards to computers
running Office 2000 that have been upgraded to OUTLOOK 2003.

I either get the message "The Office Assistant could not be started"
OR
"There are no Office Assistant characters present..."

I REALLY want to go to everyone in the company getting Outlook 2003 but we
are bound to be at either Office 2000 or Office XP by some other products we
use. That and the budget has not allowed for an upgrade to the FULL Office
2003.
We NEED these issues fixed or we cannot proceed with the rollout.

We have tried the 'Virtual Memory' fix that Microsoft suggests and that did
NOT work.

Any suggestions would be greatly welcomed.

Dave French

 

[Roady [MVP]]

You cannot use the Office Assistant of two different version at the same
time. Don't install the Office Assistant for Outlook 2003 but just use the
regular Help instead and you won't get any errors.

--
Robert Sparnaaij [MVP-Outlook]
www.howto-outlook.com

Tips of the month:
-FREE tool; QuickMail. Create new Outlook items anywhere from within Windows
-Properly back-up and restore your Outlook data

-----
I am having troubles with the Office Assistant with regards to computers
running Office 2000 that have been upgraded to OUTLOOK 2003.

I either get the message "The Office Assistant could not be started"
OR
"There are no Office Assistant characters present..."

I REALLY want to go to everyone in the company getting Outlook 2003 but we
are bound to be at either Office 2000 or Office XP by some other products we
use. That and the budget has not allowed for an upgrade to the FULL Office
2003.
We NEED these issues fixed or we cannot proceed with the rollout.

We have tried the 'Virtual Memory' fix that Microsoft suggests and that did
NOT work.

Any suggestions would be greatly welcomed.

Dave French

 

[Brian Tillman]

I am having troubles with the Office Assistant with regards to
computers running Office 2000 that have been upgraded to OUTLOOK 2003.

I either get the message "The Office Assistant could not be started"
OR
"There are no Office Assistant characters present..."

Yup. You can't mix versions of Office's pieces and expect the Office
Assistant to operate well, if at all.

I REALLY want to go to everyone in the company getting Outlook 2003
but we are bound to be at either Office 2000 or Office XP by some
other products we use. That and the budget has not allowed for an
upgrade to the FULL Office 2003.
We NEED these issues fixed or we cannot proceed with the rollout.

The Office Assistant is not required for anything and doesn't really add any
value, so yiou can do without it. But do you realize that you're also going
to break the rest of Office's integration with Outlook by just upgrading
Outlook? For example, you will not be able to use Word as the mail editor.
You will not be able to initiate a mail merge from Outlook.

 

[David French]

OUCH!! I didn't think about the e-mail Mail Merge!

I was aware of several items that there are issues with ONLY going to
Outlook 2003. I knew about Word as the E-mail Editor and most can do
without that. RTF is usually as close as they need in most cases.
I'll just have to see how we will UN-install the assistant in Outlook 2003.
It was installed through an SMS Push.
I have to get the system admin involved now.

Dave French

 

[Brian Tillman]

OUCH!! I didn't think about the e-mail Mail Merge!

You might be able to do it from within Word. If you have a list of Contacts
with which you wish to perform a mail merge, you should be able to export
that list as a CSV file with Outlook and use that CSV as the source for the
mail merge address list in Word.