Managing Office 2008

If you are thinking about deploying Microsoft Office 2008 in your environment, there are some preferences you should consider managing.

Microsoft has provided a high-level overview here. But it’s short on details. Here’s a few…

Many of the Office 2008 applications now use plist files to store their preferences. (A major exception is Entourage, which still stores a lots of its preferences in the monolithic Entourage Database.) Plist files mean we can use Workgroup Manager/MCX to manage many preferences.

Here’s what I wanted to manage:

1. Set Microsoft AutoUpdate to check only manually.
2. Turn off the Office Setup Assistant.
3. Set the default save format for Word, Excel and PowerPoint to the Office 97-2004 format (as opposed to the new XML-based formats

I started by opening each application and making the preference changes I wanted, then quit each app in turn. Next, I opened Workgroup Manager, created a new ComputerGroup called “Office2008” (you may choose to do this at a workgroup level instead, and under Tiger Server that’s probably the best option). I clicked the Preferences icon, and then the Details tab.

I then clicked the + button and imported the following plists:


~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Excel.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Powerpoint.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.plist


You can’t import them all at once; you need to import them one-by-one. As you import each one, you are given the choice of importing the preferences as “Once”, “Often”, or “Always”.
Apple warns that “Always” may not work with third-party applications, and that “Often” is often the better choice. I wanted users to be able to change the default save format, so I imported the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint preferences as “Once”; the other two I imported as “Often”, which causes MCX to re-apply the desired preferences at each login.

When I was done importing, it looked like this:

Unfortunately, when you import preferences this way – you get everything that’s currently in the plist file. You’ll need to delete everything except the keys you’re interested in.

Here are the Word prefs after deleting everything except the default save format key:

And the preferences for Microsoft AutoUpdate:

The other keys you are looking for:


com.microsoft.Excel:
2008\Default Save\Default Format
State: once
Value: 57

com.microsoft.Powerpoint:
2008\Default Save\Default Save\Default Format
Value: Microsoft PowerPoint 98 Presentation
State: once

com.microsoft.office:
2008\FirstRun\SetupAssistCompleted
Value: 1
State: often


What do you do if you can’t use MCX? You could write a script that runs at login (perhaps using this mechanism) for each user, and it could use the defaults command to set the preferences:


defaults write com.microsoft.autoupdate2 HowToCheck "Manual"

defaults write com.microsoft.office "2008\\FirstRun\\SetupAssistCompleted" -int 1

defaults write com.microsoft.Word "2008\\Default Save\\Default Format" "Doc97"

defaults write com.microsoft.Excel "2008\\Default Save\\Default Format" -int 57

defaults write com.microsoft.Powerpoint "2008\\Default Save\\Default Save\\Default Format" "Microsoft PowerPoint 98 Presentation"


(I haven’t actually tested the defaults method, but it should work…)