Tze Chuen’s Weblog

Service Pack 1 for Office 2008 was just released recently. However, many people (including me) have experienced the infinite looping setup assistant problem. Basically, you can’t get any of the Office Apps working. If you try launching any of the Office apps, it would bug you with the Setup Assistant over and over again.

So here’s how to fix it:

Make sure you have your CD Key ready.

Navigate to ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008 (you can use the Finder’s Go => Go To Folder… feature, just cut and paste this into the box)

Delete Microsoft Office 2008 Settings.plist

then Navigate to /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/

delete OfficePID.plist

You will be asked for the CD Key the next time you launch any of the Office apps. But that’s about it, it should fix the “Setup assistant loop” problem. ;)

Recently, a friend asked me if there was a way to access IE-only sites on his Mac. Off the top of my head, there are two options - one is to use IE itself thru virtualization methods and secondly is to spoof your User Agent in Firefox.

Every browser has its own designated user agent that tells the website what browser you’re using. Therefore, you can actually trick the website to think that you’re actually using a different browser such as Internet Explorer.

Enter User Agent Switcher - this Firefox add-on does just that.

This add-on is extremely easy to use. First, download it here

After installing, you will see the option to switch between different user agents in Tools => User Agent Switcher

As you can see, there are 3 different user agents to choose from. The add-on itself is also easy to use.

Here, using IPChicken to check my user agent and indeed the add-on spoofed it to IE7. Neat stuff.

This tip works on any computer that has Firefox. Doesn’t matter if it’s running Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD etc.

Hope you found much use with this tip. Cheers ;)