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Cradle from 3SL, the complete Model Based Systems Engineering Toolsuite, specialising in requirements management, requirements capture, model based systems engineering and for systems engineering software, support and consultancy, the logical choice: Cradle from 3SL.

January 2012 [Cradle 6.5.1]

Mixed Office Installations

Cradle includes components that are related to, and use the facilities of, Microsoft Office® :

  • Document Loader that parses Word documents into a Cradle database
  • Document Publisher that can generate complete Word documents from a database
  • A Spellchecker that validates the spelling of items in a database
  • Plug-ins for Word and Excel that can load data into a database
  • The RTF-to-PowerPoint converter that generates graphical output from Cradle to PowerPoint
  • Utilities to access elements of Visio files

Collectively, these are called the Cradle Toolsuite for Microsoft Office.

3SL has encountered situations where companies have installed parts of different Office versions. For example, where Access 2007 has been added to an Office 2003 installation. Such mixtures can cause problems for Cradle.

3SL builds variants of the Cradle Toolsuite for Microsoft Office for Office 2003, 2007 and 2010. Each variant uses libraries that are specific to one version of Office and will only run with that version of Office.

The resulting guidelines are:

  • You cannot install or uninstall the Cradle Toolsuite for Microsoft Office if you have parts of more than one version of Office (such as Office 2003 and 2007) installed at the same time
  • If you have a version of Microsoft Office (such as Office 2003) and the corresponding Cradle Toolsuite for Microsoft Office (such as that for Office 2003) installed, then you can add parts of a different version of Office (such as Office 2007), except Word and Excel, and Cradle will continue to work. But you MUST uninstall these parts of the other version of Office before you try to uninstall the Cradle Toolsuite for Microsoft Office, for example as part of removing or upgrading Cradle

We appreciate that this is complex and confusing!

Cradle-6.5.1 has an upgraded installer for the Cradle Toolsuite for Microsoft Office. The new installer detects all of the components of Office that are installed on your PC. It warns if this combination could cause problems and will prevent an installation if it detects a combination of Office components that will prevent the Cradle Toolsuite for Microsoft Office working.

If in doubt:

  • Please do not try to combine parts of different versions of Office
  • Ask 3SL!