MS Office 2003 - Trouble Installing

It was frustrating enough to need to format my laptop, but when MS Office 2003 didn't want to install, I was ready to pull out my hair!!!

When I couldn't get MS Office 2003 to install after a couple different error messages, I was fearful my DVD hardware was failing. The CD sounded like it was hung up and kept saying it couldn't find files. I decided to do what I always do -- I googled the problems. One website mentioned that if my computer had come with a trial version of MS Office 2007, that could be a problem. I would need to delete that first. Since I had already uninstalled it, I knew I had to dig deeper. The Activation Assistant 2007 was still on my computer. I found another site that said the Assistant needed to be deleted before deleting the trial version of MS Office 2007. I downloaded the trial version of 2007 from Microsoft and attempted to delete the Assistant first. I got an error telling me something was missing, so I again uninstalled the trial version.

As I was becoming more annoyed by the minute, I decided to try installing Office choosing the "typical" button which showed as "recommended" rather than "complete" which I had previously been trying. It worked -- it was THAT simple! If you are getting error messages when trying to install, try choosing "typical" (rather than "complete") -- it just might work!