How to automatcally uninstall Office 2007 32 bit for installation of Office 2010 64 bit

Question

I have an MSP that will automatically install my companies 64 bit version of Office 2010 provided Office 2007 32 bit is already uninstalled. However, the option to uninstall previous versions of Office does not work in the MSP. We have Office 2007 32 bit
currently installed and whenever I run the MSP I receive the following: "Setup Error You cannot install the 64 bit version of the Office 2010 because you have 32 bit Office products installed."
Is there a way to automatically remove Office 2007 using the MSP or some other method? Thanks.
Wedgies

Answer 1

What are you creating your MSP with?  I'm thinking that because you're calling the Office 64bit setup routine, that one of the first checks it does before it even processes your config.xml file is to check for previous versions installed, and it hits
the 32bit wall and stops.  What you should probably do is create a package that has two routines in it.  First process the uninstall of Office 2007 32bit, and once that's done process the Office 64 bit installation.  You could do this with a
package created by Installshield or Wise and some logic to process Step 1 (Remove Office 32bit) and then upon success of that process Step 2 (Office 64bit Install).
On a different note...is there a business requirement that you have for the 64Bit version of office?  If not...I don't think this is all worth the headache, unless you specifically need umpteen million rows of data in Excel, and the machines you're
deploying on have more than 4GB of RAM....just my opinion...
Also, I'm not sure this is a volume activation question though you might get more responses from the Setup and Deployment forum
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/officesetupdeploy/threads
Hope this helps,
r/
john
John Wildes | Senior Enterprise Architect | United Airlines | Desktop Engineering