Office 2013 Support on Robohelp 10

[David_Mallyon]

Hi All ,

I have been using robohelp for a little while now great product....

We have recentley upgraded to Office 2013 and it seems that Robohelp 10 does not support output to Word when Office 2013 is used - ( Printed Document output  works "Most" of the time on Office 2010)

Other than rolling back to 2010 (my current solution )  has anyone else come across a way of making Robohelp 10 work with Word 2013 -

If Adobe are looking at this - are there any plans to release updates that will ensure compatiblity ?

Many Thanks

[Guest]

I believe I have - is there a specific Windows 8 setting that I should look at that you think can help me?

[Peter Grainge]

RoboHelp is not going to have any specific Office 2013 or Windows 8 settings as both came after RoboHelp.

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@petergrainge

[Flaven]

Peter, I have my Word Macro Settings set to "Disable all macros with notification" without issue. Michelle, for whatever reason (primarily because Adobe RoboHelp 10 does not officially support Word 2013/356), it does not appear you will be able to use 365 with RH10. I admire your tenacity, but I think it's time to try 2013 or reinstall 2010...

[Guest]

Thanks Flaven and Peter, I appreciate you hanging in there with me. I found the macro settings you were asking about in Word, I thought you meant on my Windows 8 config. I agree, its time to give up on 365 and go with 2013 or 2010. Flaven, given what you wrote about getting 2013 (the normal install) to work on a Windows 8 machine I am going to try that first and then go to 2010. I will let you know what happens!

[Peter Grainge]

Flaven

I don't know how Adobe have managed to get around the macro settings. Thanks for letting us know that is not the issue.

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@petergrainge

[Peter Grainge]

I just tested Office 365 running Office 2010 on Windows 7 and it generated printed documentation without any problems.

With Office 365, Word is installed on the PC in the same way it always has been. There is an Office on Demand option that enables you to use Office on any PC via the cloud using your subscription. I doubt that is what Michelle was doing so my conclusion is that the issue is with either Office 2013 or Windows 8 or the combo, rather than 365 itself.

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@petergrainge

[Flaven]

Peter, I am successfully running Office 2013 on Windows 8 (64bit) with RH10--so it would seem that the 365 version of Office 2013 is the issue, or something systemic...

[Guest]

Peter, where did you find the Office on Demand option? Is it within the 365 settings? Or Word itself?

[Peter Grainge]

@Flaven

I don't think that Office is any different whether it is under a perpetual licence or a 365 licence. As you and others have 2013 running, I am more inclined to the view it is something in Michelle's environment but if Michelle is going to try with a perpetual licence, that may reveal something.

@Michelle

Office on Demand is covered on the 365 pages on Microsoft's site. See the FAQ page in particular.

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@petergrainge

[Guest]

After thinking carefully I decided to downgrade to Office 2010. And now I am ready to throw RH10, Office 2010 and my Windows 8 laptop out the window.

I completed the 2010 install and then opened RH10 to generate the printed documentation I have been hoping for. I have tried .doc, .docx and .pdf formats. The program runs through the first few steps to generate the files. Then it hangs on the screen below. At first I thought it was just thinking. But after 20 very very long minutes I tried to Cancel it and then had to kill RH10 via the Task Manager because nothing worked.

I am so frustrated. When the process starting running without error I felt like I had reached the top of the mountain. Now I am just free falling down the other side.... any ideas?

[Peter Grainge]

Michelle

I will contact you direct later.

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@petergrainge

[Guest]

I'm sure there are several of you who have lost sleep over my situation so I wanted to give you an update. With Peter's help I was able to get RH10 and Office 2010 running on my Windows 7 machine so I could produce that printed document I needed so desperately. Unfortunately, even after reinstalling RH10 on my Windows 8 machine, the printed document process still dies when its gets to the processing topics stage. We agreed the best course of action is to wipe my Windows 8 machine clean to potentially remove any remnants Office 2013 365 left behind and start over with a clean install of 2010 and RH10. Those are my plans for the weekend wish me luck!

Peter thanks again, you are the greatest! Michelle

[Peter Grainge]

You sure know how to plan an exciting weekend!

Just one other thought on the problem. I noticed you had McAfee as your AV program. I haven't seen problems reported recently but that used to cause some issues with Rh. You could do worse than disconnect from the internet and turn off McAfee, then try to print.

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@petergrainge

[Guest]

Tried it... no dice    Will let you know how the restart goes.

[wcunningham]

Unfortunately, the workaround does not work with Office 2013 64 bit installations.  Sigh...time to wait for Adobe to charge me to fix something that should have worked all along.

edit:  ANOTHER workaround I just found:  Right click on the SSL for Printed Documentation just the same as noted above...but select VIEW instead.  You're not generating it, but you can just save it to the appropriate directory and achieve essentially the same result.

[Peter Grainge]

I have had it working on a 64 bit machine and as you can see above, so have others. It must be an environment thing. I assume you have picked up that to generate printed documentation you have to right click the layout and select Properties. Other routes will not work.

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@petergrainge

[wcunningham]

Peter Grainge wrote:

I have had it working on a 64 bit machine and as you can see above, so have others. It must be an environment thing. I assume you have picked up that to generate printed documentation you have to right click the layout and select Properties. Other routes will not work.

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@petergrainge

Office 64 bit is the issue I'm guessing, not Windows 64 bit.

[LostInSpaces]

Hi, everyone:

The right-clicking Props solution does not work for me on a 64-bit Windows 8 machine with Microsoft Office 2013. I don't have Win Home Premium 365, like Michelle. These steps don't work even if I do them a second time, choose PDF instead of Word, or whether I choose .DOC or .DOCX. Just tried lihepcat's workaround of clicking View...also doesn't work (tells me the file does not exist, maybe because it never did.)

When I right-click Printed Documentation from the Single Source Layouts, and then click Save and Generate, I get this error every time: 

          ===The version of Microsoft® Word you are using has some known limitations with documents that contain a large number of list items (~1500). To avoid this problem, please download the latest Office 2000 service release (SR-2 or later). For more details, please see the online Help.===

I can click Continue on this message, and then I get this error:
===A supported version of Microsoft Word does not exist. Please install Microsoft Word 2000 or newer.===

I can only click OK on this message, and of course it won't generate the Word output. For some reason, it doesn't see that Word 2013 is installed on the machine.

Anyone else find other workarounds that fixed this problem for them?

[Peter Grainge]

The machine I used was also not the Home Premium version. Did you install the 64 bit version of Word or the 32 bit version? Even Microsoft recommend the latter for compatibility.

Has the machine in question had Word 2010 on it even if it has been uninstalled? I am wondering if that leaves a remnant that make the Properties route work.

The first message is an old one that should not pop up but does. That one can be ignored.

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@petergrainge

[LostInSpaces]

Hi, Peter!

The machine had never had Word 2010 on it, and unfortunately it was likely the 64-bit version of Word. Do you think that's why the workaround of right-clicking and going to Properties on the the Printed Doc SSL didn't work?

[Peter Grainge]

It's nothing more than a hunch. Where is Winword.exe? If it is in Program Files (X86) then you have the 32 bit version. If it is in Program Files you have the 64 bit version.

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@petergrainge

[LostInSpaces]

Okay, strike my earlier answer. It was the 32-bit version of Office.

[Peter Grainge]

Is Normal.dot on your local machine or have IT got it on a network drive?

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@petergrainge

[LostInSpaces]

Peter, thanks so much for looking into this. Because of our schedule and stuff that had to be generated, I had to ask IT to downgrade the machine back to Office 2010.

So frustrating! Had to set up everything again in Outlook, etc. because of having to go backwards.

Thank you for trying to assist; you always have good ideas. You're like the RoboHelp whisperer.

[Peter Grainge]

You only had to get them to co-install Word 2010.