Microsoft Office Accounting 2009 and Windows 10

Pleased to report that following an upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, the old copy of Microsoft Office Accounting 2009 which runs on a SQL Server 2008 Express database survived. Definitely looks compatible to me - invoices, customers, reports all still running as before.

There is an outstanding, older issue where you can't export to PDF or Word. This relates to a court case Microsoft lost over XML - bit boring, but Office installs after that date won't work with Office Accounting. I do have an older Win7/Office 2007 laptop install and a virtualised XP install, both still work and will export to PDF and Word correctly.

Note that exporting reports to Excel works ok on all versions.

Glad that the Win 10 upgrade path is a lot smoother than the original Win 7 to Win 8 one, which completely killed the Office Accounting setup, breaking the SQL install. At that time, I managed to get away with reinstalling SQL and recovering the database from backup.

Definitely don't approach a major Windows upgrade without a full backup in place!

I can't open the Word/Excel attachment in email

If you receive an email with a file attached and the filename ends with DOCX or XLSX or PPTX that you can’t open with your version of Word/Excel/Powerpoint, its probably because the file is saved in the new format for Office 2007 and Office 2010.

The older versions of Office 2000, 2002, 2003 can’t open these without an update.

Microsoft have made a converter available as a free download:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=3

Alternatively you can upgrade to the latest Office 2010 Home and Student (3 pack) for around £89 or
if there’s a pupil or older student using the computer, buy the special education version of Office 2010 Professional Plus from
www.software4students.co.uk approx. £40
You just have to specify the school/college/uni and students name

AutoCorrect UK, Missing In Acton

That post title impressed me more than finding the solution to the problem :-)

The new Vista PC is running Office 2007. Once you're over the first month of 'where did that go' its pretty straightforward. Not seen any of the Outlook problems that are described elsewhere. In fact I can't wait to get it all hooked into the new Office Accounting 2008 and see how all that hangs together too.

I did have one issue with Word/Outlook - no UK AutoCorrect. I noticed from the start that common misspellings weren't being corrected (e.g. teh) but never bothered to look why just did a right-click and corrected the spelling. The AutoCorrect was on and the default language set to UK.

Today I finally got around to poking about and discovered the English UK AutoCorrect list was empty apart from a few common symbols, certainly no words. Changed to English US and there are a load of entries and AutoCorrect works fine - well, for most words anyway ;-)

When I tracked down the relevant file which is mso2057.acl in the username\appdata\roaming\microsoft\office directory, I found it was only 1KB. The US version mso1033.acl is 37KB. Checked the original CD and I could find the US one but not the UK.

So a fix, well more of a workaround, was to copy the mso2057.acl from the previous PC's Office 2003 - look in \documents and settings\username\application data\microsoft\office. AutoCorrect burst back in to life and I'm no longer reminded just how terrible my typing has become - except when I'm blogging :-(