Cannot find Microsoft Word installed on your system

[Goldiew]

Hi,

Wonder if anyone can help...

I just tried to generate my printed documentation in RoboHelp and everytime I try I get the error message 'Cannot find Microsoft Word installed on your system'.

It is installed, and when I go to Tools > Options > Tool Locations you can see it is pointing to the right location (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\WINWORD.EXE).

This is the first project I have done with RoboHelp 7.0 on Vista- does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks

[Goldiew]

I have a dual boot machine- an XP boot and a VISTA boot. I have had X5 and RH7 installed on my XP version (and both working). I have only ever installed RH7 on my VISTA partition which doesn't work.

I now am using RH7 on my XP partition- which is a pain but at least it works.

I would also like to add that I found out today that 4 of my collegues (all whose RH7 works on VISTA) don't have Adobe Acrobat installed at all. I have version 8 installed. Do you think this add-in in word could be what is causing the trouble?

[Peter Grainge]

Maybe the dual boot is the issue. Don't know and let's look at that later.

Meantime, look at RH Explorer cannot start Word in Print Issues on my site. You will see that Acrobat is a possible cause. Please try disabling the Add in in Word | Templates and Add ins and post back.

[nitabeck]

Goldiew,

FWIW, I also have Acrobat Pro 8 on my Vista machine on which RH7 HTML can't find Word.

Peter,

I recall years ago there being a problem with the Acrobat template, and I indeed had that very problem, but I distinctly recalling its being a problem with RH for Word (though I cannot say yea or nay for RH HTML).

That said, I have attempted to disable the Acrobat add-in as you suggest. Get this: It's NOT listed among my templates and add-ins, so there's nothing for me to disable! (This flies in the face of the fact that the Adobe PDF menu is present and functioning in Word.)

As I said days ago, curiouser and cusiouser...

[Peter Grainge]

Nita

The Acrobat thing was to do with RH for Word when toolbars went missing. However, support also pointed to the knowledgebase item for that to deal with this problem.

[Peter Grainge]

Bosch-pb

Your post raises a point. Is anyone having this problem with a desktop PC or are you all laptop users?

[nitabeck]

Peter,

My problem is on my Vista desktop. There is no problem on my XP laptop.

Nita

(I wonder if we should start calling you Sherlock!)
🙂

[Peter Grainge]

Nitabeck and Bosch_pb

First, can I assume you are still having this problem or have you found a fix?

Second. There's an interesting thread elsewhere. Would you like to try what is recommended and post back?

****************************************

I have resolved this problem. I plan to test the solution again, but I’ll wait until after our product delivery date of Sept 28th. Background:
I was/am certain the problem was related to MS Word and my network ID. It appeared that in order for RH and Word to talk the robohook.wll addin must be loaded, which is suppose to “automatically” happen. Part of this "automatic" process loads the robohook.wll to ("local drive":\documents and settings\"networkID"\application data\microsoft\word\startup). When working properly, this addin file creates two occurrences of the robohook.wll which can bee seen under Tools>Templates and Addins. If you look at the path for each of the loaded robohook.wll files, they are the same BUT one path is all in lower case. However if you navigate to that file location in the startup folder (path above) only one Robohook.wll file actually exists. My problem was that the creation of the “phantom” second robohook.wll with the lowercase path, was not happening (hence VB script 5152 error). A Google search turned up a lead regarding a broken MS Word registry file which lead me to http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B92154 . I followed the steps outlined on this site (back up then delete current registry file) and RoboHelp and MSWord are talking again.

****************************************

Let me know how you get on please.

[nitabeck]

Good morning, Peter.

Problem persists; haven't found any solution on my own (but that's a function, essentially, of giving up).

Regarding your new info, I'd be happy to try the steps outlined in the linked article, but the link leads to a dead end.

Nita

[Peter Grainge]

See how many instances of Robohook.wll you have and whether there are any case differences.

[nitabeck]

Peter,

Yes, there are two instances; only the first instance is loaded.

First = RoboHook.wll. It's full path is C:\...Roaming\Microsoft\Word\Startup\RoboHook.wll

Second = RoboHook.WLL. It's full path is C:\...roaming\microsoft\word\startup\RoboHook.WLL

You've piqued my curiosity. Interesting to see where this leads.

Nita

[Bosch_pb]

quote:

---

Originally posted by: Peter Grainge
See how many instances of Robohook.wll you have and whether there are any case differences.

---

Hi Peter, and thanks for the dogged determination.

See my post of 09/26/2008 02:59:18 AM. I remarked on the same phenomenon and recorded the instances of RoboHook there.
Sorry - I'm not able to follow the directions at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B92154 because it's not available at present. You don't happen to have a copy you can paste, by any chance?

BTW I've heard nothing from Adobe on my support call, but they do make changes without notifying me, so perhaps I ought to go look again.

kind regards
pb

[Peter Grainge]

It wasn't the answer I was hoping might resolve the problem but the fact that you have a roaming profile made me wonder if that is an issue. I am trying to find out.

[Bosch_pb]

Erm...
I almost hate to say this, but I've just tried to generate a Word file from HTML help and ... it's started working again.

I have no idea what I could have changes since my last attempt. I also have no idea how long it will last. Note, both my colleagues experienced similar "miracles".


Just for the record I checked against Peter's entry of 10/23/2008 09:53:46 AM and there is nothing in my directory
C:\Documents and Settings\brp5ot\Application Data\Microsoft\Word
(where brp5ot I assume is my Windows username and, I presume, my "Network ID").


In Word Tools > Templates and Add ins > Tab:Templates I now see two RoboHooks with identical capitalization:

(checked) RoboHook.wll Full path C:\...\microsoft office\office11\startup\RoboHook.wll
(unchecked) RoboHook.wll Full path C:\...\RoboHELP\Startup\RoboHook.wll

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\STARTUP\RoboHook.wll is really present 118kb Word.Addin.8 09.05.2008 (likely installation date of RH 7)
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe RoboHelp 7\RoboHELP\Startup\RoboHook.wll is also present 118kb, 23.09.2007 (predates my RH7 installation.)

Hope this helps somebody sometime


Here's the trace output from RH7 (shortened by me)

Starting to build Printed Documentation...
Printed Documentation processor 7.00.145

Building D:\My Documents\TFS\BIS_Dev\S3K_Help\Platform\Language_1033\Configuration\_Sources\!SSL!\PrintDoc\Configuring_MyProd.doc ...

Preparing to create Printed Documentation...
Clearing output folder...
Preparing files for Print Document...
Copying files...
Updating files...
Finished preparing in 6 seconds.
Preparing environment...
Printed Document Generator Environment: Word 11.0.8227, OS 5.1.2600, RAM 1023 M Bytes
Building Printed Documentation 'Configuring MyProd'...
Building Single Document 'Configuring_MyProd.doc'...
Building 'Title Page'...
Building 'Table Of Contents'...
Preparing to build chapters...
Building 'Introduction'...
Processing 'Introduction'...
Warning: style (p.Normal) is not defined and will be mapped to 'Normal'.
Building 'General Configuration Information'...
... etc for many help pages
Building 'Tools'...
Processing 'Tools'...
Completed building chapters...
Building 'Glossary'...
Building 'Index'...
Updating list paragraphs...
Updating images...
Updating page numbers...
Updating page headers...
Updating Table of Contents...
Updating Index...
Saving 'Configuring_MyProd.doc'...
Completed building Printed Documentation...

Preparing output directory...
Cleaning up temporary files...
Finished Printed Documentation generation in 1 minute 10 seconds.

Building Printed Documentation complete.

[Bosch_pb]

Postscript.
Now that I have generated a Word doc, RoboHelp has started misbehaving in other ways:

For instance: One of my help topics is called "Creating Floor Plans". In RoboHelp (yes, I have restarted it) only the template topic header is shown in the main window.
When I double click on the html file in the directory I see the contents in a browser. This error affects many (about one four), but not all, of the files in the help application. Some show the template header, some show nothing at all, but the contents are in the html file.

The html file contents are even in the .DOC file - just not shown in RoboHelp! It's also not in the Broken Links section of the Project Manager in RH.


It's 17:45 - I think I might just go home for a quiet cry...

Thanks anyway, Peter.

[Gravenstein]

Bosch_pb, sometimes a reboot of your pc clears up those strange RH display problems. Don't despair yet!

G

[Peter Grainge]

Bosch_pb

Sounds like it was a case of out of the frying pan into the fire!

If you are still having problems with what is printing, could I ask you to start a new thread for those issues? Otherwise this already long thread will get more difficult trying to work through two quite different issues.

[Peter Grainge]

Nitabeck

You might like to look at this thread. I am still pursuing other avenues but nothing yet.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=65&catid=448&threadid=1394585#5...

[Peter Grainge]

I would like anyone still having this problem to email me via my site. I have a file which I believe will fix the problem.

[Bosch_pb]

This dreaded problem resurfaced for us again recently after we'd all meekly installed the 7.0.3 patch.

Chrissy_Tizzy's staggering of program starts (Word / RH) didn't work for us, but Peter Grainge's patched DLL did.

Once you have got hold of it (Mail Peter Grainge via the Contact form on www.grainge.org) do the following:

1. Shut down Robohelp
2. Back up  the MPJ2DOC.DLL  in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe RoboHelp 7\RoboHTML\  to MPJ2DOC.ZIP_old
3. Copy the new MPJ2DOC.DLL into its place.  Note:  File-Icon:Right-click >  Properties  > Tab:General shows that the files are identical in size (1,044,480 bytes) but Tab:Version shows that the new dll has a version of 7.3.1 and my old one 7.0.145.0
4. Restart Robohelp
5. Click Robohelp Menu:View >  Pods > Single Source Layouts
6. Select Printed Documentation and then .DOC or .PDF  (Whereby .PDF generates DOC first and thence PDF)

It works on 7.0.3. and 7.0.2 for us.

All kudos to Peter Grainge - the best tech support asset Adobe has, and he's (probably) not even on the payroll.

[Chocomunday]

There are two workstations  here that are suffering from this issue, and we need it fixed ASAP (of course). I also have RHelp 7 and 8 on my machine (don't ask) both version get this error. I have emailed Peter (thanks for you efforts, mate, you are a trooper) but no response yet. Is there  anywhere else that I can get this DLL?

Thanks.

[Peter Grainge]

I emailed it back to you immediately on receiving your reply. It was in a zip file. Sounds like your firewall is blocking it. Can you send me another email address outside that firewall? If not I'll try an FTP site.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

Follow me @petergrainge

[chrissy_tissy]

I have both Word 2003 and Word 2007 on my machine, and if I open Word 2003, Word 2007 is unregistered and RoboHelp reports that a suitable version of word cannot be found (handy).
To alleviate this, I make sure I always open up Word 2007 before RoboHelp when I'm going to do some publishing to word.

[chrissy_tissy]

If you have RoboHelp 6:
I have both Word 2003 and Word 2007 on my machine, and if I open Word 2003, Word 2007 is unregistered and RoboHelp reports that a suitable version of word cannot be found when I try to publish.
To alleviate this, I make sure I always open up Word 2007 before RoboHelp when I'm going to do some publishing to word.

[chrissy_tissy]

If you have RoboHelp 6:
I have both Word 2003 and Word 2007 on my machine, and if I open Word 2003, Word 2007 is unregistered and RoboHelp reports that a suitable version of word cannot be found when I try to publish.
To alleviate this, I make sure I always open up Word 2007 before RoboHelp when I'm going to do some publishing to word.