This was odd because this VM was primarily used for my school coursework and had Office 2007 installed, but I never tried 2010 on it. I had opened some documents that were created in 2010, but that was it. I searched my installed programs and updates and found nothing with the number 2010. Reading through the Technet forums, I saw other people with similar errors. One suggestion solved the problem for me. Running the MSI Cleanup Utility, I discovered that there were some 2010 bits installed.

As you can see from the image, there are two MUI packs from Office 2010 installed. How they got there, I’m not sure, but I suspect it might be due to opening the documents that originated in 2010 on another computer. I removed the two 2010 items with the cleanup utility and Office 2010 installed without any other problems. Hopefully this posts helps other people running into this problem.

Some people at work used the betas of Entourage 2008 and I had hope for the new version. Anything would be better than Entourage 2004. Last week I decided to use Entourage for a full week. Trying to use Entourage was an exercise in futility. I prefer to live in the “Unread” mail view with my e-mail clients, and Entourage 2008 was like 2004 in the time it took to customize it to only show incoming mail. When most people want to see unread mail, it makes sense that they wouldn’t want to see mail in the “Sent Items” or “Junk Mail” folders.

Outlook has had a great feature since at least 2003 where you can drag an e-mail over the calendar or tasks button and it will open a new calendar entry or task with the contents of the e-mail as the basis of the new entry. This comes in handy and is a time saver I’ve really gotten used to. Entourage does not have this feature. Despite the feature being around for 5 years, Microsoft didn’t include it Entourage 2008. I don’t see why they wouldn’t try and make the two products a little more similar. At least take the better features of both and integrate them to make a better product. Speaking of tasks, Entourage doesn’t pick up Tasks from Exchange either.

The deal killer for me was when I opened up Outlook yesterday and my wife called to ask why she was suddenly getting some e-mails I automatically forward to her. It was then I realized that Entourage doesn’t get the list of Outlook rules from Exchange. I have rules set up to organize my mailbox and I didn’t realize that they weren’t being filtered as they should have been.

The other Office apps are fine for my basic editing, but for any intensive work, I’m opening up Parallels and going to 2007. It’s nice being able to use the best tools from both Windows and OSX at the same time.

Tags: Windows, Mac, OSX, Office 2008, Office 2007, Entourage, Parallels, review, technology, Exchange