Office 2013(Word 2013) always crashes on Windows 7

I newly installed Office 2013 a few days ago and cannot get Word to load.  It always crashes either when I try to create a new document from a template or I try to open an existing one.

One caveat is I also installed Visual Studio Professional 2013 on the same PC, you’ll see why that’s relevant in a sec.

There are a few fixes on the internet but the one that did it for me was to disable a COM component that wasn’t working.  The particular COM object that wasn’t working for me was: Visual Studio Tools for Office Design-Time Adaptor for Word

To disable this COM object do the following:

1. Type Windows Key + R to get the run bar up
2. Type “winword /safe” to load Word in safe mode
3. Once in Word, go to File –> Options.
4. On the next screen, click on the Add-Ins screen at the bottom left, it should look like this :
5. 
6. Glick on the Go button next to the Com objects dropdown.
7. Here you will see a list of all COM components running when Word runs normally.  I disabled the COM component listed above.
8. After I restarted Word normally, it was running fine.
9. You may need to experiment with disabling other COM objects if this does not work for you.

SharePoint master page and page layouts Intellisense not working

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why this wasn’t working and came across this post from John Leino – it was an absolute life saver.

I hope it saves you time at some point in the future:

http://johanleino.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/sp2010-intellisense-not-working-with-master-pages-in-vs2010/

In case the content goes missing, I have copied it here:

SP2010: Intellisense not working with master pages in VS2010

One thing I noticed when starting to work with SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010 is that when you are editing a master page (and some other type of items) you get no intellisense.

Why this is I have no idea but I can guess that it has to do with the project type that the SharePoint project is based on (getting back to that in upcoming posts…) which is not a web template.
OK, but you can get around it thought.

The solution

What you do is right-click on the .master file and choose “open with…”

Then you click the “master page editor” and click “set as default” button.

Now it should work again…

SharePoint Network Topology Diagram Add-In

So I saw this great tool which dynamically generates a diagram representing your farm topology once plugged into your SharePoint farm.  It’s an extension for Visio 2010 and it can use an optional timer job to periodically update a document to ensure that you have a near real-time representation of your server farm, whenever you need it.

Thank you Codeplex and Microsoft!

A generated diagram can look like this:

With the following drillable information:

Any farm administrator worth his salt will be using this tool on a very regular basis.

http://visio.microsoft.com/en-us/Templates_And_Downloads/Software_Add-ins/Pages/Visio-2010-Add-in-for-SharePoint-Network-Topology-Diagram.aspx

Relating and Editing Data from Multiple Data Sources

I was looking into the BDC recently and found this blog post for editing data in multiple related tables at the same time.

Take a look, it's fairly straight forward.

Relating and Editing Data from Multiple Data Sources

Editing SharePoint 2010 list forms

Used a good little Microsoft help guide today to assist in editing list forms.  Of course this is the designer method and any developer worth his salt will take amendments into Visual Studio and make a deployment package out of them but, its still a good start: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-designer-help/create-a-custom-list-form-HA010378258.aspx.

Installing PDF iFilter for SharePoint 2010

One of the most common things you will ever need to do on a new SharePoint server is to install the PDF iFilter to ensure pdf’s are crawled and hence searchable.  I found a good blog post here written by Syed Adnan Ahmed from which I have copied the following content.

Follow the steps below to install and configure PDF iFilter on SharePoint Server 2010 or Search Server Express 2010.

1. Install PDF iFilter 9.0 (64 bit) from here.
2. Download PDF icon file from pdf16.gif and copy at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\.
3. Add the following entry in docIcon.xml file, which can be found at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML.

   <Mapping Key="pdf" Value="pdf16.gif" /> 

   
   
4. Add PDF file type on the Manage File Type page under Search Service Application.
   
5. Open registry by executing regedit on the Start --> Run.
   
6. Navigate to the following location:

   \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\
   14.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension 

   
   
7. Right-click Extension, a menu will appear.
   
8. Click New--> Key to create a new key for .pdf. See screen shot below:
   

   

   
   
9. Enter .pdf and save key.
   

   

   
   
10. 
    

    Now add the following GUID in the default value as shown in the figure below.

    {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603} 

    
    

    

    
    
11. If you are configuring SharePoint Server 2010, then restart Search service by executing the following command on the command line:

    net stop osearch 
    net start osearch 

    
    
12. If you are configuring PDF iFilter on Search Server 2010, then restart the SharePoint Server Search 14service as shown in the figure below:
    

    

    
    
13. Perform incremental to include PDF files.
    
14. PDF iFilter is successfully configured. Now you can search for the content of PDF file. See screen shot below:
    

    

Note: SharePoint Server 2010 or Search Server 2010 Express provides out of the box search support for .ZIPfiles, so you download and have to install Microsoft Filter pack as you used to do with MOSS 2007

SharePoint user profiles

Just thought I would write a quick note to remind myself about a good post that I found a while back.  I’ve been fire fighting a problem with a botched migration where the user profiles are all out of sync with the new domain.  This blog explains in enough detail the steps you need to take to resolve user profile sync issues, especially between WSS and MOSS profiles (beyond doing a full profile import):

http://sharepointnotes.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/syncing-wss-and-moss-user-profile-properties-with-active-directory/