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Q: I have Vista and loaded the Office 2010 Disc on my desk top computer. It seemed to load correctly and I put Word, Powerpoint, Excel and oneNote on my user account desktop screen with icons. As you can tell I am not a techie. All seemed ok. Then I opened my wife’s user button and the 4 Office programs were not in her all programs Office 2010 drop down list and were not on her desk top. How can she have access to all of the Office Suite from her user account on this computer? Also if the disc needs to be reloaded in the computer does this count as another machine load as there is 3 maximum downloads I understand. What did I do wrong and can you explain how to correct this problem?

– Bill W.
Destin, Fla

A: I’m not so sure that you really did anything “wrong”, Bill, as you have an error-free installation of a pretty complex product. You’ll even find that if you try, you can run it just fine from your wife’s account by locating the installed executables and running them directly. All that’s missing from her account are the convenience icons on the Start menu and/or the Desktop, and I can surely tell you how to correct that. First, let’s cover a little background on just exactly what is going on, and how it happened. The whole purpose of having multiple accounts on a computer is to provide a means to keep the data and personal settings of each user separate from all the other users. You’ve probably noticed that Windows has folders with friendly-sounding names like “My Documents” and “My Music”. What you might not have noticed is that although these folders seem to have the same name for every user account, the actual contents are different for each account. These are part of what Microsoft calls “special folders” – a concept that was introduced in Windows 2000 to free users from absolute file paths that might vary from user-to-user. There over 25 of these special folders in the current version of Windows, and each user gets his or her own distinct copy of each, so that personal files and settings can be retained on a per-user basis. What has happened in your case is that you installed the software using your regular user account, which is fine, because the software itself installs into non-special files. However, when it came time to put up the convenience shortcuts, Windows made entries only in your user account’s Start Menu, leaving all the other accounts alone. Since your Windows Desktop also belongs only to you, the icons that you placed there are also private to only your account. As stated above, the entries on your Start menu and Desktop are merely shortcuts to the actual Office 2010 program files. To create ones for your wife’s account, you could sign in as her, then locate the program files and create shortcuts to them manually, which you can place on the desktop or the startup menu, or both. There are several ways to creating shortcuts. One pretty simple way is to right-click on the file in question and select “Send to Desktop”. From there you can cut or copy and then paste them to the Start menu. You could also sign in as yourself, copy all the shortcuts to a non-special folder (such as C:\Stuff, or whatever temporary directory name you can think up) then sign in as your wife, and copy them back out of that folder and on to her Start menu and/or Desktop.

With regard to the remainder of your question, the disc should not need to be reloaded to do any of this, but if it does, it should not count as another machine load, since you’re loading it onto the same machine as you have done previously. Finally, to prevent this problem from happening in the future, you should not install software from your user account, but rather signed in as Administrator. By that, I mean using the user account which is actually named “Administrator” not some other account that happens to have administrator access rights. By using the Administrator account, you should be able to install software in such a way that all users that sign-into the computer should see the shortcuts on their Start menu automatically.