As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently running the Office 2007 beta. Recently I’ve been getting the error “The document could not be registered” every time I create a new document, change the style set and at other times.
Apparently the problem is due to the “DCOM Server Process Launcher” service not starting. I was unable to start it manually, but after setting it to start automatically I was able to repair the Office installation and get things running as normal. It also fixed a problem I was having with the MSI installer service, which had stopped me from updating Windows as well as running most installers.
Fixing the DCOM Server Process Launcher
First of all, you need to open the “Services” manager. You can do this either by selecting “run” in the start menu and typing “services.msc”, or going to “Control Panel”, then “Administrative Tools” and selecting “Services”.
You should see a window similar to the following:
Select the item named “DCOM Server Process Launcher”, right click and select “Properties”. This should bring up the following dialog:
Select “Automatic” from the “Startup type” drop down, and then select “OK”. Close the service manager, and then you’ll need to reboot.
Repairing the Office 2007 Installation
Once you’ve rebooted, you should be able to repair your Office installation. Go to the control panel, select “Add or Remove Programs” and select the entry named “Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 (Beta)”. Click the button called “change”, and then select “repair” from the options. This should then start the repair process. It took quite a while for me, so you might want to make a cup of tea or knit a jumper whilst you’re waiting.
Once it’s finished, it’ll ask you to reset. Once you’re reset your machine, everything should be back to normal. Phew!
Update: Jack and Mike have both found that giving the document file a shorter name can solve this problem too. Cheers!
Updated 2: Al Simon also encountered this problem, which was caused by a corrupted file. You can view his solution in the comments below.
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Today marks the 15th birthday of everybody’s favourite blue hedgehog, Sonic!
Although his more recent games haven’t been so great, the original Sonic games still stand out because of their speed, appearance and general “pick up and play” style gameplay. He’s spawned countless games, TV shows and plenty of merchandise too. He’s even had a gene named after him!
Happy birthday, you spikey ball of fun!
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In case anyone’s wondering why it’s been a little quiet here, it’s because I’m currently on holiday in sunny Florida. A lot of interesting things have happened in the last few weeks, including the release of plenty of screenshots of the new Office 2007 user interface, which has certainly attracted a lot of feedback. David Seah also links to a Ruby on Rails implementation of the Printable CEO.
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My brother’s recent post, “Death of an Idealist“, got me thinking about how perfectionism is often more of a hindrance than a help.
Perfectionism is a major block for me, and it was highlighted this weekend whilst I was working on my current project. I’ve been stuck in “Analysis Paralysis” for a few weeks, because there’s always that feeling that it “has to be perfect”. I decided to write some code, but as part of a “sandbox” so that I could tweak things and then copy the code to the main project when it was ready. Almost immediately I felt a boost, and wrote some pretty good non-perfect code.
Writing software is difficult, and it’s not made any easier when you are afraid of “getting it wrong”. Just giving myself the safety of a “sandbox” removed this barrier, and made programming a lot more fun than it has been for a while.
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I’ve happily used Windows XP for the past four years, but I’d heard good things about Linux so I decided to give it a try last year. I now use Linux for a lot of my non-programming tasks, and although I feel parts could be improved, it’s a very pleasant environment to use.
Getting Started
The first thing to do was to grab a Linux distro. I use Mepis, because it’s the only LiveCD I could get working on my laptop. I highly advise using a LiveCD to start with, as it allows you to try everything out without installing anything on your hard-drive.
After clearing roughly half of my hard-drive of unused programs and Windows files, I defragmented and partitioned it. The Mepis OS centre makes partitioning your drive a straightforward affair, and the install process was quick and simple. It guides you through installing a boot loader if you want to keep your existing OS (which I did), so now when my laptop boots I get a quick menu to choose between Mepis and WinXP. The whole process took a few hours, but it was a lot simpler than I had imagined. The Mepis installer does a good job of guiding you through the steps to install.
My favourite apps
I wasn’t really sure what to expect with Linux, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the applications. My most used programs:
I’ve used Winamp for years, and amaroK was a bit of a change for me. It’s got plenty of great features for organising your tracks and albums, such as downloading track information and album covers. There’s support for last.FM, dynamic playlists and a host of other rather nifty features.
I don’t like it as much as Office 2003, but I prefer it to OpenOffice.org. It does have an “autocomplete” feature similar to OpenOffice.org which I’m rather fond of, as it can speed up typing long words.
Gaim is a great IM client that works on multiple platforms. It handles the popular protocols (MSN, Yahoo!, AIM/ICQ) very well, and also supports IRC and Jabber.
TaskJuggler is a project management application which moves away from the standard Gantt editor. Tasks are entered using a text editor, which can be daunting at first. It takes a while to learn the syntax, but once that’s out of the way it’s really quite powerful. It can generate HTML and XML reports, as well as our trusty friend the Gantt chart.
Other bits and pieces
The one thing that really convinced me to give Linux a try was the LiveCD. It’s a really nice idea, and meant I could play around with all the features before clearing space and partitioning my drive. I really expected things to be a lot harder than they were, and despite a few crashes I’ve found the whole thing easy to install and use. It’s certainly worth a look if you want to try something new. Mepis has a good community of very helpful people, and you can generally find the answer to any problems quickly.
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