The WIN10 Experience - Post 2

This is a blog of the experiences I have Installing and navigating the new Windows 10 Operating System.

So far, Win10 has been downloaded and activated with minimal effort, and only a modest investment of my time. My computer was occupied for an hour or so., but no problem there, it did not require my personal intervention. So there we go, WIN10 and a pretty familiar interface. My old programs were across the task bar on the foot of the screen, with a couple of new icons I need to examine.

The most active applications for me are email (Outlook), browsing (Firefox) and data analysis (Excel). I opted for Office 365 when I bought this machine a year or so ago, and that should be a cakewalk for Microsoft. So – I punched up Excel from the Taskbar.

Uh-oh.

The Excel opening window pops up, instructing me to log in to my Microsoft account to activate. OK, I can do that. And Excel produces this response:

First response – hit the “Repair Now” button and move forward. Restart Excel from the Task bar.

Same response from Win10 – login to activate, followed by an Excel crash. Do it again. Sometimes three times IS a charm. One more time. Nope.

My response – pop up Firefox and search “Windows 10 errors.” A fair amount of listings, many for Office product install or activation errors. But no helpful advice. Since there was no quick solution there, I decided to check out the other Office components for Win10 errors.

WORD  is on my taskbar, next to Excel. From there, it pops up ready to go. No problem. But where is PowerPoint? I never linked it on my task bar…But scrolling through the app tiles does not produce Office PowerPoint, or any of the Office 365 applications. Wait, “All Apps” is at the bottom pf the Task List. AN alphabetic list of installed programs comes up, and Microsoft Office 2013 is there. Punch that for a lower dropdown menu, and there they are, all of the familiar Office apps. PowerPoint fires up, and properly loads a list of recent files, and everything works fine. Outlook loads and updates my emailbox. Let’s try Excel from here.

Whoops. It works!

Excel loads up a recent spreadsheet, even recovers the file I was marking timings for the WIN10 install. Looks fine. Close up, back to the Taskbar to try again, and voila, Excel executes properly. Microsoft equivalent of kicking the TV set.. [Older readers will know what I mean; if you don’t, ask someone over 50 if they have ever kicked or slapped their TV.]