Irregular Activity » Trouble Shooting

OpenBase Database – What is it & Uninstall….

Darren Cornwell — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:20:31 +0000

It’s kind of funny when you find random application installed on your drive, OpenBase is a database management and storage tool – several Mac application use this. In my case the easiest way to figure out what it was doing was to run the OpenBaseManager application in /Applications/Openbase.

My version reported only 1 database ‘Daylight’ which is part of the Marketcircle product Daylight Express, I have had this removed for quite some time, but OpenBase does not seem to offer an uninstaller – so a bit of shell magic is required.

Open the Terminal and enter:

sudo /Library/OpenBase/bin/RemoveOpenBaseScript

Magic, it will be uninstalled – just be sure to check nothing is using it first or you may have some problems on your hands ;)

Excel 2008, Copy / Pasting date field, wrong data….

Darren Cornwell — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:47:49 +0000

Here’s another great head scratcher in the office debacle – why when you are copying date fields from one sheet to another does Excel feel the need to change the date? It all about the 1904 date format you see. All new sheets created in Excel are automatically set to the 1904 date format whereas all previous versions of Excel were set to the 1900 Date format – it’s an easy fix.

In the sheet that you wish to copy the date to, open up the preferences (Excel -> Preferences).

You then need to open up the ‘Calculations’ section of the preferences.

Then simple select and uncheck the ‘Use 1904 Date System’ – hey presto, if you copy data from your ‘old’ sheet, it will magically appear correctly in the new sheet!

Note: If you are using a Windows computer, you will need to go to Tools -> Options -> Calculation Tab.

Microsoft Office 2008 Launches Setup Assistant Instead of the Application (Upgrade)….

Darren Cornwell — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:11:40 +0000

Not to sure what’s going on? Many people have reported this problem and we aim to get to the bottom of it – I really don’t fancy hitting up 80 macs and trying to figure this out. It seems that many users are having this problem and the problem stems from two fronts either a) Your using an illegal copy (in which case I’m sure you can find another way around it) or b) The update has trashed some of your preferences – solutions below:

Corrupt pList files
These are the wonderful little files used to set application data, go and search out ~/Library/Preferences and delete all files that start com.microsoft -then restart the application.

Microsoft AU Daemon
This has been causing a few problems for some, go into system preference, open up account / login items and find the AU daemon, disable / delete it and try your application again.

Word Settings Files
If your beloved word is crashing on you, seek out your home directory (your account name) and hit up /Library/Preferences/Microsoft – delete the word settings files and relaunch.

Corrupt Fonts (Extremly unlikely to be the cause)
Have you installed any fonts recently? If you have you might want to temporarily remove them and you guessed it – relaunch the app!

Actual Shitty Installation….
Make sure your logged in with admin prividges – check? Open up your trusty terminal and enter:

sudo chmod -R a-st “/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008? “/Library/Fonts/Microsoft” “/Library/Application Support/Microsoft”

then:

chown -h -R root:admin “/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008? “/Library/Fonts/Microsoft” “/Library/Application Support/Microsoft” “/Library/Automator”

Surprise, surprise – restart the application and pray! If you want to know what you have just done, you have changed the permissions (chmod) and ownership (chown) on a couple of directories, hopefully given the OS access to the correct files.

Illegal Copy / Serial Number
This is a really easy fix – to simple in fact! You need to eradicate 2 files from your system:

/Users/username/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008/Microsoft Office 2008 settings.plist
/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist

Now when you restart Office 2008, you will be taken back to the setup assistant and it will re-serialise your copy, simply enter the serial number from yout box and you’ll be laughing all the way!