Reinstalling or Repairing Office

If you're a typical user, you need read no further. With Office installed and ready to go on your computer, you're ready to move elsewhere in the book and start working on interesting projects and reports. But down the road, consider this: if one or more of the components in the Office 2000 software suite crashes or behaves strangely, and you can't trace the problem to another program on your system (and restarting your computer doesn't seem to help), remember that you can run the Office Setup program to repair or reinstall the software. When you run the Setup program in this state, it enters something called Maintenance Mode.

Office Setup enters Maintenance Mode whenever Setup is launched on a system that already contains a valid copy of Office 2000 on it. When Setup is in Maintenance Mode, you can repair an Office installation, add or remove Office components, or remove all Office files from the computer. The exciting new command in Maintenance Mode is Repair Office, which checks the current Office installation and fixes problems it can detect without reinstalling the entire suite (a lengthy process). To repair an Office installation, complete these steps:

1. Close any application programs that are running on your computer.
2. Place Office 2000 Disc 1 in your CD-ROM drive.
3. If the Office Setup program doesn't start automatically, click Run on the Windows Start menu, type d:setup (or specify a network location), and press Enter.

   The Setup program starts the Windows Installer utility and enters Office 2000 Maintenance Mode.

4. Click the Repair Office button. The Office Setup program asks you if you want to reinstall Office completely or repair the current installation.

   When you reinstall Office 2000, it copies all the Office applications and components again and restores Office to the way it was when you first installed it. When you repair an Office installation, Setup will search your computer for problems in the current installation and fix them. Note that both options might require you to insert your Office CDs or specify a network location for Office files.

5. Click the maintenance option you want (Reinstall or Repair), and then click Finish.

   Setup evaluates your current installation parameters and copies the necessary files to your computer.