Portable Apps: OpenOffice as an Alternative to Microsoft Office

I was in the process of assembling a set of portable applications to run in Windows XP.  After some investigation and experimentation, I concluded that there was not presently a solid, affordable way of making a portable version of my copy of Microsoft Office 2003.  Since I did want office-type programs in my set of portable apps, I decided to look into alternatives to Office.

One alternative, of course, was to upgrade to a more recent version of Microsoft Office.  In the case of Office 2010, there were (as with Office 2003) various offers of free downloads of a portable version.  Some of these offers seemed to be related to an offer of a free trial that Microsoft had floated in 2009.  Others were apparently pirated versions, typically with little explanation of how the portability had been achieved.  I did not investigate the question of how well these copies would work.

Since acquiring Softricity, Microsoft itself had moved toward developing application virtualization for purposes of facilitating enterprise software installation.  Of course, that was a long way from setting up Office to run from a USB stick.  At this writing, Microsoft's concept of portability was oriented toward portable devices (e.g., phones, laptops).  Office 2010 did come with "portable device rights" in this sense.  There did seem to be one way to install Office 2010 on a USB drive with Microsoft's blessing, more or less:  obtain and install Office 2010 Starter Edition, and then install Starter Edition on a USB drive.  Starter Edition was adware; it replaced Microsoft Works; it consisted solely of limited versions of Word 2010 and Excel 2010; and it was officially available only a preloaded software on purchased computers.  There were ways to download it otherwise.

I had several reasons for not choosing the Microsoft option.  Those reasons included a need for some advanced features, a need for the ability to work with other kinds of files, especially via PowerPoint and Access, a desire to avoid the distraction of adware, and a preference for not being dependent upon Microsoft.  This was not to say that I would avoid using Office 2010 altogether.  I just wanted something that would work effectively on a USB drive.

Another alternative to Office 2010 was to move away from Microsoft altogether, to the extent possible.  There were several apparently significant alternatives to choose from.  The most popular still seemed to be OpenOffice.  The OpenOffice suite continued to have the advantage of being usable on multiple platforms -- so that, for instance, I could still get into a file, via Ubuntu Live CD (or dual boot, or virtual underlayer), even when Microsoft Windows or Office became completely nonfunctional.  OpenOffice also included programs that would work with those varieties of files just mentioned (i.e., Access databases, PowerPoint presentations).

One question, for me, was whether OpenOffice would display the relatively unrefined kind of interface and functionality that had recently prompted me, despite myself, to lean back toward using Windows rather than Ubuntu applications (even if I was doing so primarily in Windows running within a VMware virtual machine on Ubuntu).  If I had ever used OpenOffice in Windows, it had been a long time ago; in recent years I had only used it in Ubuntu, and very infrequently at that.  So now I took another look.  I did a brief trial run of OpenOffice Writer Portable for Windows, running from a hard drive, just to sample its look and feel.  Preliminarily, it looked and felt good -- noticeably better and more familiar than the Ubuntu version, though no doubt the two actually functioned pretty much the same.  On this basis, I decided to go ahead with some efforts toward using OOo (as they call it, short for OpenOffice.org) Writer more frequently.

Portability, another question, was a no-brainer.  The version that I had just sampled was part of the PortableApps.com standard suite.  The concept was that I would set up my full portable suite on the hard drive, so as to avoid having to install programs whenever I set up a new computer or virtual machine, and then I would copy that folder of portable apps to the USB flash drive when I needed to take those tools on the road -- with my laptop or to someone else's computer.  With this concept in mind, I returned to my effort to come up with a good set of portable applications for Windows XP.

Portabilizing Apps with Ceedo Personal

I was trying to create a portable version of Microsoft Office 2003.  That effort had led me to discover a positive review of Ceedo Personal and a favorable contrast against PortableApps.com by PC Magazine.  I decided to take advantage of a free trial to explore Ceedo.  This post described that exploration.

I was running this test on Windows XP SP3, running in a cloned virtual machine (VM) in VMware Workstation 7.1.  This VM was running a bit slow, but a VM generally would give me the option of wiping out everything and just making another clone, where I could start the experiment over from the beginning.

In the case of Ceedo, the VM did not seem to matter.  When I tried to install Ceedo in that VM, it insisted, instead, on being installed to a removable device.  That seemed unfortunate.  I had been working on developing a folder full of portable apps that I could use on my own computers and could also copy to a USB drive.  Running them from the hard drive was much faster than running them from the USB drive, so that's what I planned to do when working at home.  It now seemed that Ceedo was not going to cooperate with that plan.  But I hoped that a solution to this problem would emerge as we went along, so I went ahead with the installation on the USB drive.

During the installation process, I got a balloon pop-up telling me that the Ceedo Tray Icon Indicator would light up whenever I was using a program that was running under the Ceedo environment.  I guessed that this was a replacement for the previous approach that I had read about, where Ceedo would surround its own programs with an orange line.  Then Ceedo installed a toolbar at the top of the screen.  When installation was done, I had the option of taking a tour, which I did.  The gist of it was that Ceedo gave me that toolbar, which I hated, with its four buttons -- three of which were completely unnecessary, since they merely opened My Documents, Internet Explorer, and Outlook Express.  The fourth button opened something that looked like the Windows Start Menu, with Ceedo-specific choices (in addition to yet another set of My Documents, Internet Explorer, and Outlook Express).  There was no entry for Ceedo in the real Windows XP Start Menu, which made sense from a no-impact perspective; apparently the top toolbar was running entirely from the USB drive.  I used the top toolbar to open My Documents and no, the orange line had not been removed; it was there after all.  Since the only thing I needed from the top toolbar was the imitation start menu, and since I could get that by clicking on the Ceedo icon in the system tray (bottom right corner of the screen), I went into Ceedo's Options and instructed it to hide the toolbar when it was not in use.  I also changed some other settings.

I felt that Ceedo needed to give that imitation start menu a name.  For present purposes, I will call it the "Ceedo menu."  I went into that menu > Add Programs > Programs Directory.  It seemed to wish to open its own session of Internet Explorer, and apparently could not tolerate the fact that I already had Internet Explorer running.  It said, "iexplore.exe is already running.  Click 'OK' to open Ceedo's Internet Explorer and close the local Internet Explorer."  So I said OK.  Ceedo could perhaps instead give users the option of searching automatically for installed programs (or at least those having Start Menu entries) in the background; then, when users actually sought to open a file, they might have the option of doing so in those installed programs rather than mandatorily running them from the USB drive.  This would have avoided both the need to shut down the running program (Internet Explorer) and the slowness that I was experiencing when Ceedo did everything from the USB drive.  My present understanding was that speeding up Ceedo (if I could not run it from the desktop instead of the USB drive) would require buying a faster USB drive, such as the Kingston Vault (presently $40+).  In any case, the Ceedo menu did not stay onscreen during this process; it vanished as soon as I chose Programs Directory.  Programs Directory, itself, turned out to be just the Ceedo webpage listing the various freeware apps that you could apparently run from Ceedo.

I was more interested in seeing if Ceedo could portabilize my apps.  I experimented, first, with IrfanView.  To portabilize Irfanview, I went to the Ceedo menu > Add Programs > Argo Application Installer.  It offered to show me a list of programs supported by Argo, so I clicked on that option.  Nothing happened.  After playing around a bit, I found that it was trying to take me to a different list of applications than the one that I had just seen.  There weren't many items on it, and it didn't seem to contain any deep, dark secrets.  So apparently Ceedo was still in the process of trying to organize its website.

So anyway, back in Argo, I tried to point toward the IrfanView .exe file.  It was very slow in identifying the .exe files in My Computer.  It occurred to me that I wasn't sure whether it wanted the setup .exe or the installed, ready-to-run .exe.  I tried the IrfanView setup .exe.  That, in itself, was a bit perplexing, because there were two IrfanView setup .exe files -- the setup itself, and the plugins -- and I would want them both included in my IrfanView installation.  There wasn't an option, as there had seemed to be in JauntePE, to include materials that had been incorporated into a previous iteration of the portable app.  But anyway, on the next screen, Argo confirmed that I had guessed right:  it said, "The wizard will now launch the following setup file."  It gave me an option of installing in "reduced machine separation mode," which a webpage said would entail some permanent installation on the host PC in order to use that machine's resources.  Another page said, somewhat obscurely, that this "reduced separation mode" would enable the portable app to "interact" with apps on the host.  The idea seemed to be that you should choose this option only if you or the program actually needed that kind of interaction.

So I went ahead with the Argo process.  It gave me the IrfanView installation screen.  I went through the IrfanView installation process.  When that was finished, Argo was gone, and I had an IrfanView installation in the designated folder on the hard drive.  I realized then that maybe I should have designated a folder on the USB drive.  I couldn't tell if Argo had done anything in particular to make IrfanView portable, since IrfanView tends to be portable anyway.  I also couldn't tell what I should do to install the IrfanView plugins, other than (I guess) just run them through the Argo process and point to the same output directory.

So, OK, maybe IrfanView wasn't the best program to experiment with.  I tried again, this time with Microsoft Word 2003.  I started Argo, browsed to the Office 2003 installation executable file, and ran it.  After a while, I got this:

Microsoft Office 2003 Setup
Error 1719.  The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed.  This can occur if you are running Windows in safe mode, or if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed.

That was odd.  I had just installed and uninstalled Office 2003 in that same VM.  The installer had worked fine then.  But OK, I created another clone VM, in which there had been no prior Office 2003 installation, and booted it up.  This time around, I did something that perhaps I should have done last time:  I rebooted when I got the message that the hardware (i.e., the USB drive) had been recognized but might not work properly until I rebooted.  After I rebooted, I got a Ceedo Action Window that gave me the option of enabling Ceedo AutoDetect.  That, according to the Ceedo help file, was a "tiny" optional component, installed on the host, to detect whenever a Ceedo drive was connected.  I said yes, do this.  It took Ceedo a long time to load; and when the "Loading Ceedo" message did finally disappear, I was surprised to see that the Ceedo icon likewise disappeared from the system tray.  I went to the USB drive in Windows Explorer and restarted Ceedo manually from there, but it said, "Ceedo already running."  Yet it did start a new "Loading Ceedo" message anyway.  If Ceedo was running, where was it?

Eventually, I did get a Ceedo icon in the system tray, and when I clicked on it, I was able to go back into Argo and start the Office 2003 installation again.  I tried again to install Office 2003 and again got that Error 1719 error message.  This was occurring in a VM clone like those that I had been using repeatedly in recent days to test various programs.  To test it, I closed Ceedo, removed the USB drive from the system, and tried installing Office 2003 natively in that VM.  It ran without difficulty.

That concluded my test of Ceedo.  Moreover, since my investigation had not turned up any superior alternatives to Ceedo that would do the job, this concluded my search for tools that would give me an affordable, portable copy of Microsoft Office 2003.  So at this point I returned to the main project -- of developing a set of portable applications for Windows XP -- with the sense that I might need to consider alternatives to Office 2003.

Microsoft Office 2003 Updates in 2010 and Beyond

Introduction

At one point, I had installed Microsoft Office Professional 2003, and I wanted to know what updates were available.  Once upon a time, that was easy to determine.  You would just go to the Microsoft Office Updates webpage and let it take a look at your computer and tell you what you needed.  But that webpage was no longer available.

Microsoft was apparently still supporting Office 2003, and it was still possible to get updates from the general-purpose Microsoft Updates webpage.  But under various conditions, that would not work either.  For instance, Microsoft might decide to cut off that source of automated updates for Office 2003, just as it had cut off its Office Updates automatic detector.  Or you might not be able to go online when you were doing your installation.  Or if you did go online, as I had sometimes experienced, that webpage might not be willing or able to detect the condition of your computer and figure out which updates you needed.  Or you might be trying to install all available updates at once -- that is, you might not be willing to wait around until the webpage did detect all of the updates you might need.  That was the situation at present.  I was trying to convert Office 2003 into a set of portable applications, and for that purpose I needed to do all of my updates at once if they were to be included in the portable executable package.

To figure out what updates I needed, I went to the general-purpose Microsoft Office Downloads webpage and glanced at its hundreds of downloads, including many that were unnecessary and even obsolete.  Then, taking a different approach, I looked at another computer, where Office 2003 had been installed in March 2009.  (On that machine, all Office programs were installed except InfoPath, and Outlook 2007 had been installed in lieu of Outlook 2003.)  On that machine, I went into Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Show Updates.  Under Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, it listed a number of updates.  Those updates had been installed automatically by Office Update between March 12, 2009 and March 10, 2010.  With one exception, all of the updates listed there were newer than Office Pro Service Pack 3 (SP3).  That one exception had not been included in SP3, so apparently Office Update knew that it still had to install it separately.

Armed with that information, I went back to the full list of Office updates.  At this writing, there were 3,204 items on that list.  I sorted them by Release Date and skipped ahead to the page for September 2007, when SP3 was released.  I noticed that there were other SP3 packages released at about that same time, for a variety of Microsoft products, including some that were related to Office 2003 tools or capabilities (e.g., Office 2003 Proofing Tools) that I had not installed and/or had not been using on that other computer, and that therefore had not been updated.  So the list that I was developing in this post would probably not be sufficient for all purposes and all users of Office 2003.

I decided to assume that the automatic Office updating feature had been giving me what I needed, for my Office 2003 installation, up through that last update on March 10, 2010.  Therefore, I skipped ahead again, in the Microsoft webpage list, to the page showing updates released on or after that date.  That page was very near the end of the list.  (I tried, here in this post, to provide links to these points in the list, so that other users would not have to page through the list manually, but I found that Microsoft had structured the pages so that the links invariably led to the start of the list.  Microsoft did not itself bother to provide a button leading to the end of the list.)  From that point forward in the list, starting in March 2010, there were not any other updates pertaining to Office 2003.  So it seemed that the March 2010 updates were the state of the art.

But that could hardly be correct.  After thinking a moment, I remembered that, because of a broken installer or some other problem that I had been unable to fix, that other computer had ceased to install updates from the regular Microsoft Update webpage.  So now I asked that webpage to examine that computer and indicate what other updates it needed.  It came back with a list that included several more updates specifically related to Office 2003.  I did not know why these additional updates had not appeared in that list of 3,204 updates on the Microsoft Office webpage.

The List of Updates Generally

I combined that list of uninstalled updates, from the Microsoft Update webpage, with the list of updates that had been installed successfully.  Here is that combined list, with links to the relevant KnowledgeBase pages:

Release Date	Programs Affected	KB Number
11/08/05	Excel, Word	KB907417
09/17/07	All Office 2003 (SP3)	KB923618
12/08/07	Outlook	KB943649
02/11/08	All Office 2003	KB945185
02/12/08	Works File Converter	KB943973
05/12/08	Publisher	KB950213
08/08/08	Access Snapshot Viewer	KB955439
08/08/08	All Office 2003	KB921598
09/08/08	All Office 2003	KB953404
11/07/08	All Office 2003	KB951535
10/09/09	Outlook	KB974554
10/09/09	Outlook	KB973705
10/13/09	All Office 2003	KB972580
10/22/09	Web Components	KB947319
11/09/09	All Office 2003	KB973443
12/07/09	All Office 2003	KB975051
12/17/09	All Office 2003	KB978551
02/04/10	PowerPoint	KB976881
03/05/10	Outlook	KB979771
03/05/10	Excel	KB978474
05/10/10	All Office 2003	KB976382
06/04/10	PowerPoint	KB982157
06/04/10	Publisher	KB982122
06/04/10	All Office 2003	KB982311
06/04/10	InfoPath	KB980923
07/07/10	Access	KB981716
07/08/10	Outlook	KB980373
08/05/10	Word	KB2251399
08/04/10	Outlook	KB2279246
08/04/10	Excel	KB2264403

Again, this list would vary if one were to install other components from Office 2003.  My purpose here is primarily just to sketch out what seems to be one way of determining what updates are needed for one Office 2003 configuration.

The List of Updates for Word 2003 Specifically 

This list of updates, and the other information provided above, seemed to provide a straightforward guide to the updates that would be needed for individual components within Office 2003.  I tested that assumption, starting with Word 2003.  That is, I installed only Word 2003, without any other Office 2003 components beyond those that were automatically installed for any Office configuration.

I expected, from the foregoing information, that the Microsoft Update webpage would detect and install all of the items from the foregoing list that pertained either to Word specifically or to Office generally,  I expected, in other words, that when the dust settled and all the updates were installed, Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs would show me just the following updates under Microsoft Office 2003:

Release Date	Programs Affected	KB Number
11/08/05	Excel, Word	KB907417
09/17/07	All Office 2003 (SP3)	KB923618
02/11/08	All Office 2003	KB945185
08/08/08	All Office 2003	KB921598
09/08/08	All Office 2003	KB953404
11/07/08	All Office 2003	KB951535
10/13/09	All Office 2003	KB972580
10/22/09	Web Components	KB947319
11/09/09	All Office 2003	KB973443
12/07/09	All Office 2003	KB975051
12/17/09	All Office 2003	KB978551
05/10/10	All Office 2003	KB976382
06/04/10	All Office 2003	KB982311
08/05/10	Word	KB2251399

That, however, is not quite how it had worked out.  After installing only Word 2003, the Microsoft Windows Update webpage was telling me that I had no other updates to install.  I thought maybe this was because it was a brand-new installation and it needed some stimulation to get busy and figure out where it stood.  In hopes of triggering some action, I started Word and fiddled with it for a minute, and then I rebooted the system.  But the Update webpage still showed no other updates available.  Likewise when I powered down the system and left it alone for a couple of days.

I wasn't sure what that meant.  Was the Windows Update webpage never going to detect that updates were needed?  Or did I just have to use Word for a while, triggering some unknown functions, before it would become aware of its desperate need for an update?  Did it matter that I was doing this inside a VMware virtual machine (VM), rather than in a native WinXP installation?

The alternative to the automated online update, of course, was to just go ahead and install that list of Word-specific updates manually.  So I did that.  I uninstalled and reinstalled Word; and when it ended, I accepted its offer to go online and check for updates.  Without the old Office Update webpage, however, that option just delivered me to the general-purpose webpage mentioned above.  I killed that and started down the list of updates, installing them one by one, beginning with SP3 (KB923618).

After doing that, I went into Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Show Updates and verified that those updates were all listed under Microsoft Office 2003.  They weren't.  KB945185 wasn't listed.  I ran it again, and it said, "This update has already been applied or is included in an update that has already been applied."  That puzzled me:  how would I have gotten its number in the first place, if it hadn't been listed previously?  Same thing with KB953404.  Anyway, then I went to the Windows Update website to double-check that there were no others.  There weren't.

Conclusion

I could have continued with the same approach for Excel 2003 and other components of Office 2003.  In the meantime, however, it had developed that the underlying goal of creating a portable version of Office 2003 was not feasible with existing programs and resources.  So I did not continue on to explore what updates would be needed for those other Office components.

Making Microsoft Office 2003 Portable

I had discovered that many Windows XP applications came in portable form, or could be made portable, and I had decided that portability had some advantages for me.  In the process of transitioning toward greater use of portable apps, I came across the question of whether Microsoft Office 2003 could be made portable.  This post describes my investigation into that question.

Normally, I would just install Office from the CD, and by default it would do its installation thing on drive C.  Alternatively, I had found that I could download copies of Office 2003 that people had converted into portable format.  These presumably pirated versions seemed to carry the risks of being unstable or nonworking, and also of infecting my computer with viruses when I downloaded or ran them.

The more intriguing possibility was to use an application virtualization tool designed to create my own portable version of Microsoft Office (or of other installed software, for that matter).  Among the many virtualization tools listed in Wikipedia, I wanted WinXP-compatible freeware.  This amounted to a search for information on Cameyo, FilePacker, and JauntePE.  In a relatively brief inquiry, depending heavily on the slickness of the developer's webpage, I got the impression that Cameyo (although still in beta) was the best-developed of the three, so I started with that.

I found descriptions of Cameyo's virtualization process at DotTech and Addictive Tips; I also found at least some potential for support in Cameyo's own thinly developed forums.  The basic idea was that, when I ran Cameyo, it took a pre-installation snapshot of my entire system.  Then it wanted me to install the program that I wanted to package (i.e., Office 2003).  Then it would run a post-installation snapshot, and give me the package.

The DotTech article seemed to say that installing the whole Office 2003 suite at once would cause a problem:  all of the programs in it would run anytime I tried to start any one of them.  So that wasn't a great prospect.  The better idea seemed to be to package just one Office 2003 program at a time.  I decided to start with Microsoft Word 2003.  For that purpose, the first question was, what should be included in a complete installation of Word?  The first thing, of course, was Word itself, along with the relevant updates downloaded from Microsoft.  So that's where I started, with Cameyo running.  (I was doing these tests in clones of a clean new virtual machine (VM) running in VMware Workstation 7.1 on Ubuntu 10.04.)

When I installed Word, I chose the advanced/custom installation option, and indicated that I wanted to install everything under Microsoft Office Word (but nothing under any other program), along with the default Office Shared Features and Office Tools.  When the installation finished, I had the option of removing setup files from drive C.  I decided to keep them, even though space on a USB drive would be relatively limited, because I certainly wouldn't want to have to go hunting for a setup CD when I was off somewhere, relying upon my USB drive.  I was relieved that none of the updates required a reboot; then again, I noticed that Cameyo's dialog box said, "If installation requires reboot, simply reboot" -- so apparently it would just keep right on recording on reboot.

After that, the next step in the Word installation process, for me, was to install the converter pack from the Office 2003 Resource Kit.  I used the AutoCorrect.dot macro to restore my large collection of word corrections and abbreviations.  I also used the Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard to restore various configuration adjustments that I had made and saved from a previous Office 2003 installation.  For some reason, it did not restore all of those adjustments.  For instance, in Word's Tools > Options > File Locations, I had to reset the preferred locations for files.  To automate this for future reference, I took Regshot pictures of drive C before and after making those changes, and saved the difference as .reg files for possible use in some future installation.

At that point, I clicked the "Install done" button on Cameyo.  It spent quite a while taking a post-installation snapshot, as I had heard it would -- a half-hour, I would say, though I didn't time it.  When Cameyo was done, it just sort of disappeared.  I wasn't sure where it had saved the finished product.  The only two options in the Start menu were Capture Software Installation and Package Editor.  I had already done the former.  When I tried the latter, it gave me an blank window with File as the only menu pick.  I tried File > Open.  It defaulted to its own program folder, and there was nothing there related to the Office 2003 portable executable file that I was hoping to find.  Nothing in My Documents, nothing on the Desktop.  When I restarted Cameyo, it showed nothing under "Recent Packages."   It didn't seem like others were having this problem, so I posted a question on it in the Cameyo forum.

While I was waiting for a reply, I did what I probably should have done in the first place:  I uninstalled Word 2003 and prepared to reinstall it, again with Cameyo watching, but this time I didn't plan to continue on with the time-consuming process of installing updates.  Instead, I planned to do a quick installation of Word 2003 by itself, just to try it out.  But now Cameyo wasn't wanting to cooperate.  It crashed three times in a row while trying to do its pre-installation scan.  That may have been related to a problem with the operating system.  I was doing this stuff in VMware virtual machines (VMs), and this particular one became unstable.

So I tried again in a new VM.  It was a clone of a newly created WinXP installation, with virtually no prior program installation or uninstallation, so I didn't expect any more operating system issues.  I installed Cameyo in this new VM, set it up to capture, and proceeded to install Word.  This time, it ended differently.  After its ending snapshot, it gave me a dialog labeled "Main Executable."  This dialog asked me to provide the name of the application, to say where I wanted to save it, and to identify its main executable, i.e., the program that I wanted to run "when the package is opened."  Under that last question, it gave me about ten choices.  First on the list, and the correct answer, was WINWORD.EXE.  Other possibilities included OIS.EXE (Microsoft Office Picture Manager) and MSPSCAN.EXE (Microsoft Office Document Scanning).  I wasn't sure what it took for an .exe to make it onto that list.  Maybe these were programs that had run during the setup process.  I noticed that PROFLWIZ.EXE (the Save My Settings Wizard) was also on the list.

After I filled in those blanks and selected WINWORD.EXE, I got an indication that Cameyo's Packager was building the package, and then it said, "Success.  Package successfully saved in" the directory that I had named.  I went to that directory and took a look.  There, I saw a file named MicrosoftOfficeProfe.WINWORD.virtual.exe.  Its size was 6,361KB (i.e., 6.2MB).  That seemed pretty slim.  I wondered whether it did somehow contain references to other Word installation files on that computer.  I also noticed that this completed job was not listed in Cameyo's list of Recent Packages.  I renamed the file to be Portable Microsoft Word 2003, and tried running it right where it was.  I got a dialog:

Fatal
Cannot find RESOURCE_COREZIP

So, OK.  Not a good sign.  I did a search for that file and concluded that it was telling the truth:  I couldn't find RESOURCE_COREZIP either.  I wondered if renaming had caused the problem, so I changed its name back to the longer original form and tried again.  But no, I still got the same Fatal message.  So was I perhaps supposed to include most if not all of those other programs (e.g., MSPSCAN.EXE) in the final package after all?

So far, I wasn't too impressed with Cameyo, and I was also starting to have some questions about how (or whether) this packaging concept would work, for a program that needed to be changed from time to time, as was the case with Word.  I mean, would I be able to adjust its settings, and would any changes that I made be preserved?  Suppose, for example, that I wanted to add another AutoCorrect item to my list.  Suppose I was doing a lot of work for the International Delegation of Information and Operations Training System, and I hated typing all those words:  I just wanted to designate a shortcut (IDIOTS) and let that expand into the full name.  I'd type IDIOTS, hit the spacebar, and, boom, AutoCorrect would do its magic and give me that whole long name instead.  Could I add that to the packaged Word, or not?

Ideally, I would have tested that in Word itself.  But since I wasn't getting too far on that front, I tried Cameyo again, this time using a simpler program as a proxy.  So I used Cameyo while installing IrfanView 4.0 and its plugins.  Cameyo's packager crashed while trying to do its initial snapshot, so I tried again.  When installation finished, I went into IrfanView's Options menu and took a look at some of the default settings.  Then I went to Cameyo's packager and clicked "Install done."  It took its post-installation snapshot and gave me the "Main Executable" dialog again.  This time, though, it didn't name any main executables at all, and it also wouldn't let me type in the path to where the newly installed IrfanView executable was.  So I named a folder where I wanted it to save the main executable and clicked OK, and again it reported Success.  But there wasn't anything to run in the target folder, so I think Failure would have been the more appropriate report.

So I was done with Cameyo.  I noticed that JauntePE had gotten a number of mentions on PortableApps.com, whereas FilePacker had not, and anyway I had started out with the impression that JauntePE was considered a leading if imperfect entrant in this field.  So now I tried JauntePE.  I downloaded both the alpha executable and an apparently accompanying set of runtimes and unpackaged them both on a clean new VM.  Then I ran JauntePE.exe.  It admitted it was an incomplete program.  I clicked on its "house" icon, which I took to be the home or starting point.  That seemed to be where I was already -- nothing happened -- so I tried the next icon, showing "tools."  Nothing happened.  Third icon:  the tooltip said this was the JPE Quickie option, which the home screen had said was where I should start.  I ran JPE Quickie.  In its first screen, it gave me the option of naming an installer or an application already installed, and also the option to "leave intact any Quickie portable data [or discovery data, whatever that was] from previous runs" -- suggesting that, with JauntePE, perhaps I could indeed start up from where I had left off, after making subsequent adjustments to my Word 2003 installation.  I took a look at Quickie's Settings tab, but wasn't really clear on what most of them were about, so I just left them as they were.

So I clicked "Run Portably" and then "Run Normally" to run Quickie with the IrfanView setup executable.  It did its thing and gave me an error message:  "Unhandled Error."  I clicked OK from that.  Then it showed me the IrfanView installation screen; but after a moment, that crashed.  This was unexpected:  IrfanView had always installed for me without any problems.  I canceled out of that and tried "Run Portably" again.  Now I got a message indicating that JauntePE could not access a certain discovery mode output file.  It said, "If you have corrected the problem, click OK, otherwise Cancel."  I hadn't corrected anything, so I clicked Cancel.  Despite the error, which was apparently not serious, JauntePE proceeded to try to install IrfanView again.  It gave me the same Unhandled Error message, and again the IrfanView installer crashed.

Well.  JauntePE was alpha software, after all.  If it was having this much trouble with IrfanView, I hated to think what it might be like to try to portabilize Office 2003 with it.  I skipped on to FilePacker.  Unlike JauntePE, FilePacker was not a portable app.  It installed to drive C.  I ran it.  It was simple.  It created a 7MB executable.  I ran that.  It opened up the IrfanView installation dialog.  So basically (as the writeups had already more or less explained) the concept of FilePacker was just that it would combine, into one package, all of the executables you designated; and when you ran that one package, it would run those executables, or at least one of them.  It wouldn't actually give you a ready-to-use portable application.

So far, JauntePE had come closest to offering (although not providing) what I wanted:  a portabilizer that would also seemingly allow me to include subsequent updates, changes in program settings, and other adjustments, without having to go back through the whole setup process from the beginning.  Ideally, it would also be slickly packaged, so that I wouldn't have to do a lot of research to figure out, by trial and error, how I should have answered this or that question during the setup process.

Apparently I was going to have to pay for a program that would do that.  Looking again at Wikipedia's article on portable application creators, I decided against the category of programs that would require something to be installed on the host machine, in favor of those that created true portable (i.e., standalone) apps.  This meant that I was opting against U3, PackageFactory, and MojoPac,.  For instance, the developer's webpage said, "MojoPac requires the host PC be logged in with administrative privileges or have MojoPac Usher installed."  I also wasn't looking for the creation of an entire virtual environment from my USB drive, which was what both MojoPac and Ceedo Personal offered.  A review by nc10 said that, unfortunately, in MojoPac, any software with a copy protection scheme tied to a particular computer (including specifically Microsoft Office) would fail to operate on other computers.  Also, I didn't want to be dependent on Microsoft, so that eliminated Microsoft Application Virtualization, and I didn't want to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars, which meant I wouldn't be using BoxedApp Packer, Spoon Studio, LANDesk Application Virtualization, InstallFree Bridge, or VMware Thinapp.

It seemed, at this point, that the market for heavy-duty portabilizers was still immature.  Even if I was willing to pay up to $100, I was going to have to wait, probably for a couple of years, to find a selection of high-quality programs that would crunch something like Word 2003 into a single package that I could just carry around and run on any Windows computer, and could also update without having to go back through the whole setup process.  I did decide to try Ceedo Personal, by the way.  The story of that investigation is in a separate post.  In a word, it only reinforced this sense of market immaturity.

To sum up, there seemed to be some ways in which Office 2003 could become portable.  That development might require nothing more than the emergence of a better version of, or competitor to, the programs cited above.  While I did not think that the market for such programs would mature within the next year, I could hope that at least one affordable, robust application of this nature would emerge within months.  At present, however, it appeared that I could not make a portable version of Microsoft Office 2003.