# Word & Excel everything is greyed out



## sweetloop (Sep 29, 2004)

Hi all,

Sorry in advance for the lack of details. My sister called me last night about a problem she is having with Word & Excel 2002. She was describing the problem over the phone so the details are a bit sketchy. Basically she can open word & excel, but once it's open she can't do much with it. All menu options are greyed out and she cannot type in the blank document/blank cells. She's tried rebooting and opening different files with no luck. If she opens an existing file she can view it but not change it. If she opens a new blank document she can't type anything. Any ideas?


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## Chevy (Jul 25, 2003)

Has she activated the product? I believe you need to activate Office XP and 2003 before you can use it (you may get a temp time, but then it could lock out).


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## sweetloop (Sep 29, 2004)

That might be possible, but's a new Dell laptop so I think it would have come already activated. She didn't say anything about any messages telling her to activate it. I'll check with her tonight (she's a couple time zones away from me). Any other ideas?


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## blmbrsm (Oct 13, 2004)

If it was working a couple of days ago just fine then she might also have a virus. Make sure she does a virus scan and may also want to use an online scan such as Trend Housecall which is FREE. If no virus files are found she may have a corrupted template file. Have her look for all normal.dot files and delete them. Then start up Word and open a blank document which will automatically create a new template. Then try opening an existing Word document and see if it is all grayed out still.


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## sweetloop (Sep 29, 2004)

I got a message from my sister last night. She hadn't activated Office. I guess she shouldn't have ignored all those warnings...

Thanks for your help.


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