Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Word and Excel 2007 slow to open documents

One of my users had this apparently common problem -- opening either Word or Excel documents in Office 2007 was taking a long time (about 1 minute). Opening the document from within the application was fine.

This was the solution:
http://excel2007-slow-open-file.blogspot.com/

Basically, installing the "Analysis Toolpak" addin "fixed" the excel problem, but Word was still slow. So I installed "Lookup Wizard" (in Excel) and the Word problem was also fixed. Awesome, yes? I LOVE MICROSOFT!!!11!

Enable Microsoft Update in Windows 7 via script

By default, the Automatic Updates feature of Windows 7 does not include updates to other Microsoft Products such as Microsoft Office.

In the Windows Update control panel, you can enable Microsoft Update, but I needed to automate this for all of my systems.

It turns out that you can enable Microsoft Update using a simple VBS. You can run this script via any means you like (psexec, GPO startup/login script, etc.)