Last weekend I was home doing some paperwork and I had to
send a fax to my insurance agent. I hadn't sent a fax in several months and not
since I had reimaged my computer with Vista and Office 2007. So I opened Word
and looked in the templates for a fax cover page. Word ships with several
templates as standard, but it also includes a link to an Internet-based gallery
of templates. I selected one of the Internet-based templates and was informed
that this feature required that Microsoft verify that my Office installation
was "genuine." Sure, whatever, I thought to myself and I hit the
"Continue" button. To my shock, Office reported that the validation
had failed! My Office installation wasn't genuine!
That's odd, I mumbled. There's a link that takes you to a more
detailed explanation of what is wrong with the validation. I clicked on it and
the resulting web page told me my Office installation hadn't been activated
yet. It said all I had to do to fix it was run any Office app and it would
automatically start the activation process. I shook my head and cursed at
Microsoft for inflicting this garbage on me. I double-checked Word and sure
enough, it claimed that it was already activated. So I concluded that Microsoft's
"genuine" validation routine was on crack. I get all
my Microsoft software directly from MSDN, so there's no way my Office
installation was phony.
I futzed around with the web site a bit more trying to
figure out how I could convince the Great Genuine Validation Gods that I didn't
steal this copy of Office. No go. I called the tech support number and was
quickly transferred to another call center because I got my copy from MSDN.
This new call center told me they couldn't help me on the weekend unless my
"business" was experiencing a Severity One emergency. Call back
Monday, he said. I was irked as hell about this but there was little I could
do. So I hauled out my laptop which had Office installed from the exact same
CD. It worked fine, I got my stupid template, and I sent my fax.
Due to my employer's current MSDN configuration, it was
difficult for me to log a support incident with Microsoft about this so I
didn't bother looking at it again until this evening. I suspected that
something went awry with my Office install on Vista so I set about trying to
"repair" it from the CD. Nope, no good. I was getting ready to uninstall
and reinstall as a last resort when I remembered that I had installed Microsoft
Project 2007 at the same time I had installed Office Professional, but I had
never run Project at all. Hmmm, I thought to myself, I'll bet the Genuine Gods
are pissed off because I've never run Project, so they're not going to let me
into their special Internet club! So I ran Project (which installed using a
different product key than Office and thus needs its own activation), it
immediately wanted to be activated, I activated it and promptly closed it. I
went back into Word, tried to open an Internet-based template, went through the
"Genuine" validation voodoo, and it worked!
So, my question to Microsoft is: Why the hell did I have to
active Microsoft Project so that I could download a Word template? In what
twisted demon dimension does this bent logic make any sense? Good grief. (But I still think the Ribbon interface is way cool.)