Problem creating new Excel 2003 Workbook or Template Project with Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Question

My company is using Office 2003 SP3 (which is what I have installed on my development machine), but I'm developing apps with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Team System Developer Edition), WPF and .NET 3.5 SP1.

Now I'm getting started in VSTO but when I try to create a new Excel 2003 Workbook or Template Project (creating a new document) with Visual Studio 2008 SP1, I get the error "A compatible version of Microsoft Office is not installed on this computer. You must install the version of Office that is compatible with your project...". I can however create a new Excel 2003 Add-In project.

I have both the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition runtime and the Visual Studio Tools for Office system 3.0 runtime installed.

Any help or hints would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Do you have (or have you ever had) any other version of Office installed on your development machine?

Mainly, I'm concerned that any Office 2007 compenents have been introduced that may have modified the Registry. But also parallel installations of more than one version of Office can keep VSTO from working correctly.

You should also try repairing the Visual Studio as well as the Office installation.

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Cindy Meister, VSTO/Word MVP

Answer 2

I repaired Office, Visual Studio and the 2 VSTO runtimes but still get the same error.

I'm developing on a corporate PC (running XP SP3) so I'm not sure if Office 2007 was originally on it and then uninstalled and replaced with Office 2003 for "corporate compatibility" before it was given to me. Our local dept. tech support guy may know this but is on vacation this week. Corporate tech support has been outsourced and is now useless, so I'll have to wait until our local guy comes back.

Is there anything in the registry that I could look for to tip me off about the Office 2007 components you're talking about?

Looking in Add/Remove programs for currently installed stuff, the 2007 things I see are "Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office System", "Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2" and "Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007".

Answer 3

See if the Registry information in this message thread helps you:

 

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/thread/08f13e9d-895c-4102-b6d9-e327af8cf8c0/

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Cindy Meister, VSTO/Word MVP

Answer 4

After reading through the registry info message thread I poked around in the registry and found plenty of evidence for a previous install of Office 2007 on my PC. The problem is, I don't get any CLSID info from Visual Studio as part of the "A compatible version of Microsoft Office is not installed ..." error, so I can't figure out which typelib is relevant to the error.

Any ideas about where I can get more info about this error? Is it logged somewhere that I can look at to get more info?

Answer 5

Altbier,

Which Office 2003 SKU you have installed on the machine?
please check if you satisfy the requirement here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc160742.aspx

Hamed

Answer 6

I looked in Add/Remove programs and it says Office Standard Edition 2003 is installed, so you may be on to something here. I have an MSDN subscription so I'll download the Professional version and try that.

More later either way...

Answer 7

I uninstalled Office 2003 Standard Edition, installed Office 2003 Professional, repaired the 2 VSTO runtimes and Visual Studio and now it works! I can now create Excel 2003 Workbook or Template projects in Visual Studio.

Thanks Hamed and Cindy for your help on this!