There are two problems occurring due to updates to Microsoft Office 2010 and 2013. They effect different types of installations.
1. If you purchased your computer from a retail outlet it probably shipped with a trial edition of Office 2010. This trial edition has long since expired but is still installed on your computer. You have another version or edition of Office installed. If those conditions are met then your Office icons will go Orange and the file associations that allow you to click on a Word document and have Word open (as an example) are reset to the expired trial edition. The solution is to reset the file associations and remove the expired trial software.
1a. If you purchased your computer from a retail outlet it may have included a click-to-run version of office. This installation type is used by some computer manufacturers to minimize what they have to install on the computer before they ship it. Instead of installing office they install what is essentially a shortcut to download office. If you have installed office this way then the same file association problem will occur as above. You are most likely to experience this problem at home.
2. If you purchased Office through volume license and one of a set of two updates gets installed but not both, then the Outlook folder pane will be hidden behind a big blank space. The solution for this problem is to install the second update. Unfortunately the second update is currently a manual download and isn’t being delivered via normal channels (the mistake that Microsoft made) so it is unlikely that anyone will get the second update. We have the file and are ready to install it but we can’t do it proactively because to do so would also break Outlook.
Microsoft is currently working on automated fixes for these two issues which I would expect to happen soon. In the meantime if you hit either of these call us. We have the manual fix available and can do it quickly for you.
-Amy
