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ghporter · Jul 25, 2015, 06:00 PM

The thing is, it was running fine before I "cleaned up" my hard drive. I moved Applications, Library, and Users folders to an external drive, reformatted the drive and reloaded Yosemite. I tried running the Office apps from the external drive, and they fail while loading dependent libraries. OK, I thought I'd just reinstall it from scratch. So I dug out the DVD and installed it. The apps fail while loading their dependent libraries, just like with the copy on my external drive.

This bugs me a lot. I've run other apps from the external drive, but the Office apps (plus Pacifist, for some reason) fail with errors that indicate dependent files aren't found.

The only reason I'm trying to use Office 2008 now is to recover mail items from the Entourage database. It seems that my folder structure was too complex, and when I exported the mailboxes, it looks like I didn't get everything, so I am trying to get the old mail items in those sub-folders. If there's a way to do that without fiddling around with MS apps, I'd sure love to hear it!

ibook_steve · Jul 26, 2015, 01:50 AM

2008? Yeesh. Do you at least have 2011? There's probably a good chance that one of the numerous updates MS has released since 2008 came out is required for running on a modern machine. Didn't 2008 have a drag and drop install option? You could then maybe manually download and install the latest service pack update (one of the big updates).

Just some thoughts.

Steve

ghporter · Jul 26, 2015, 11:31 AM

I'm thinking there's a difference between my not being able to open the "backed up" app and the installation not working. When I tried to open Pacifist, I got a message that some library wasn't found. Today, I poked deeper and tried to open the actual executable file. The error message said "file too short." So... Maybe when I backed stuff up, I missed some hidden files.

Not amused at this.

As to why the fresh install fails, I'm at a loss. It's like the app is looking for something specific to a prior OS version, or the installer puts stuff in different locations. I don't know why, between Leopard and Yosemite, there might be a different way to arrange anything, and for that matter, isn't an installation scripted by the package?

I have tried running the updates from MS, starting with the earliest one (12.0.1). It fails, saying there's no such app installed. Unless the DVD has something like version 12.3.1, (and there are over a dozen updates between 12.0.1 and end of support last year), there's something really squirley going on here.

I'm OK with not installing the software, but I would really like to be able to recover those old emails.

ghporter · Aug 2, 2015, 11:23 AM

I've resolved this issue, not by getting Office 2008 to install and run, but by doing something else to recover my mail.

Some research points to an issue with the Office 2008 installer. It appears that something in the installer uses PPC code, which was fine in 2008. I found a documented dodge using Terminal to invoke the installer. Unfortunately, it failed in Yosemite, though it will probably work in an earlier version of OS X - the article I read had it working in Mountain Lion. Other research points to some naming convention issues with various folders. I've given up reloading this stuff...

I found an app called Emailchemy, from Weird Kid software. It cost $29.95, but it did the job quickly and well, recovering mail from the Entourage database file (a 1.29GB honking chunk of disk space) and produced MBOX files. It even preserved my huge and complex system of subfolders in my mailboxes! Definitely worth the money!

Now, I'm going to put those MBOX files where I can find them and sift through them at my leisure. I'll eventually wind up with a proper archive of stuff I want to keep, and I'll get rid of what I don't want to keep.

P · Aug 2, 2015, 02:44 PM

Some googling shows that the signature used to sign the Office 2008 installer has expired, which is why it won't work now. If you disconnect from the network and turn the clock back, it apparently works. Haven't tried it myself, though.

ghporter · Aug 2, 2015, 07:49 PM

I would think an expired signature would show itself in some way other than having the installer seem to run only to have the finished installation fail.

To add some extra weirdness, some time after I tried the Terminal installation procedure, I clicked on a document, and WORD STARTED UP!!!!!! I was prompted for my product key, and when I entered it, everything seemed to work. I think my iMac's hard disk is haunted. I'm not going to actually use Office now, but I'm afraid to try to remove it.