Thank you Microsoft

For sucking six hours of productivity out of my life.

It turns out that if you install a smaller MS Office package over a larger one, using the default settings, the extra bits of your old installation get zapped.

Oh, without a by-your-leave. They just disappear.

Bye-bye Outlook!

Fortunately the *.pst file was left behind, so I figured I could reinstall.

Uh, no. Well I could, but Outlook would open up and then apologetically fail, offering the opportunity to send a message to Mr Microsoft. Okay, well maybe I ought to move up to the current Outlook then? That installed, but then failed in an identical way on startup. I tried uninstalling Outlook and reinstalling. The behaviour was the same. I couldn’t even get the thing to open up as a fresh installation.

Reluctantly, I thought, I’d go over to Outlook Express 6. It imported all my messages, but not my contacts. I had to import them using Windows Address Book, which made them available to that. Then I set up my account information. Email receiving worked fine, but email sending … unable to contact server.

I went to do other stuff for a couple of hours. Then I came back and uninstalled every bit of both versions of Office. Rebooted. Installed an even older version of Outlook that I new would act as a totally new installation. I set it up properly, imported all my emails and contacts, and made sure it worked in all respects. Then I installed the Office that was there this morning over the top of that, so I’m back where I was before I started this whole thing.

And that’s where I’m leaving it.

But, seriously, is it good software design to have it delete applications which are not part of it without any warning whatsoever? This is Office 2010 we’re talking about, not some fly-by-night primitive piece of software!