If you have installed Office 2010 (minus Outlook 2010) alongside Office 2003, you may have noticed that you can no longer use Microsoft Word as your email editor. You will receive an error when you attempt to compose an email and it will use the default editor. While this does let you send emails; you lose the advanced formatting, spell-check & grammar-check that Word provides.
The problem is caused by Microsoft Office 2010 registering itself as the default handler for Word documents. We can fix this by turning this feature off. Here is how:
- Close Outlook, Word 2003, Word 2010
- Run "regedit" to open the Windows Registry Editor
- Select the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Word\Options (If you are having the issue with Office 2007, change 14.0 to 12.0)
- From the Edit menu, select New. Click DWORD.
- Type NoReReg as the name. Press Enter.
- Right-click NoReReg, and then click Modify.
- In the box, type 1. Click OK.
- Close Registry Editor
- Start Word 2003
- Start Outlook 2003
Instructions were adapted from Microsoft instructions for a similar issue with Office 2007:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=928091
