Microsoft Office is the premier office applications suite in the world. The main reason for its popularity is its versatility, ease of use and the profusion of features. But it sometimes annoys you when it stops working or throws up errors and refuses to work as expected. Microsoft has come up with a tool called Office Configuration Analyzer Tool (OffCAT) that can help you diagnose and fix Office related problems easily.
The Office Configuration Analyzer Tool provides a quick and easy way to analyze many of the Microsoft Office programs for usual problems in their configurations that may cause problems. This can be very helpful when you want to quickly identify possible issues when contacting the Microsoft Office help desk.
You can download the Office Configuration Analyzer Tool from the Microsoft website. The download is in form of an MSI setup installer. After the installation, you can launch it from its desktop or Start Menu shortcut. It shows up as OffCAT 1.1 in the Start Menu or desktop. In the OffCAT window, select the Start a scan section to choose a scan.
It will automatically detect which versions of Office (and which components of Office) you have installed on your PC. It can scan for configuration problems for Office 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013. You can choose an office program (like Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc.) to scan for problems and click on the Start Scanning button to start the scan.
After the scan is over, you can see the reports of the scans finished. It will show you all the issues found with Microsoft Office configurations. Some of these problems can be fixed right away. For example, if you do not have the latest updates for Microsoft Office, then you can download and install them to fix the issues.
So if your Office installation is not working properly and you are making up your mind to call the Microsoft help desk, then first use the OffCAT tool to diagnose the problems yourself. Even if the problems found are not self fixable, you will have some information that you can share with the Microsoft help desk to quickly resolve your issues.
You can download Office Configuration Analyzer Tool from http://www.microsoft.com/.