MS Office 2011 Debacle

I usually only blog when I have something worthwhile to contribute, or feel compelled. Today I am compelled to blog about a glitch in MS Office 2011 and in particular Outlook 2011 for Mac OS X.

I received a cellphone call on Wednesday morning from a friend and client who uses a MacBook Pro running Lion. The friend had recently done the MS Office 2011 SP2 update that comes via the automatic update feature in Office 2011. Now she was panicking because Outlook would no longer open her email and she was receiving an error message about rebuilding the mail database. I told her I would meet her at the local coffee house (Smokey Row) in a couple hours after doing other IT tasks.

Perhaps some background is in order here. MS Outlook stores its messages in a single database file on the Macintosh under the Documents folder. The subfolder is called Microsoft Identities 2011 which contains the Main Identity. Occasionally, it is probably a good idea for the Outlook user to run the Microsoft Database Utility which rebuilds indices and makes a backup of the database file, but the process is normally a manual one. My friend had only been using the new Outlook since December 2011.

Back to the story. So I meet up with my friend over a cup of house coffee and proceed to look over the error message. Outlook 2011 14.2 (SP2) wants to "upgrade" the old database to conform to the newest format. That process runs for 30 seconds and discovers there are problems with the mail database, so it launches the Microsoft Database Utility, which runs through step one of fixing the database. Oops, a problem occurs. Microsoft Database Utility 14.2 is too new to perform operations on the mail database. We are given an error message and told to use the old Microsoft Database Utility.

OK, at this point I look and discover that the SP2 update from Microsoft does not preserve the older version of the Microsoft Database Utility. So no problem, I get the original media and install Microsoft Database Utility from DVD. I run the Microsoft Database Utility version 14.1 and it reports that it can not fix the mail database, because "I am using the wrong version". Wait a second here, what happened.

Fast forward through an hour of looking at Time Machine backups of the old mail database, and the same errors about versions keeps coming up. By the way Time Machine actually saved the day here, so for those of you who are Mac OS X users, don't be fools - USE TIME MACHINE!

Finishing my cold coffee and ready for a refill, I finally came to a thought that perhaps Microsoft Office 2011 SP1 (14.1.4) had also changed the mail database and that its Microsoft Database Utility was the key. So, I fired up Time Machine and went back to Microsoft Office 2011 SP1 (14.1.4) and tried that Microsoft Database Utility on the mail database. It proceed to fix the problems and make a backup. Then I upgraded to SP2 and processed the mail database by launching Outlook 2011 SP2 and everything worked.

Hey, only took 1 hour and 45 minutes. Part of my problem was that while I use Office 2011 and Word and Excel, I never use Outlook or PowerPoint. I think OS X Mail and Keynote better and they really are better.

To Microsoft programmers, how hard would it be to have the Microsoft Database Utility run prior to performing the SP2 upgrade? There is not even a warning message about potential issues. And the TechNet articles, while painting the process of using Microsoft Database Utility nicely, have no mention of the fact that Microsoft Database Utility versions are particular to the current state of the mail database. The SP2 update process should have maintained the older version of Microsoft Database Utility in case of problems.

I have learned a lot about how MS Office 2011 has issues with regard to its mail component and there is serious room for improvement.