Open Office: installation wizard cannot be run properly

Can't Install Open Office?

It's frustrating when you've finally decided to take the leap to open source office and the installation won't even work.  Are you seeing the error message: The installation wizard cannot be run properly because you are logged in as a user without sufficient administrator rights for this system?

If you are, it's not necessarily because you don't have sufficient privileges.  Here's how to get around this issue and how to successfully install Open Office:

How to successfully install Open Office

There's two ways to get around the above error message.  The easiest way is if you have your harddrive partitioned.  Simply extract the installation files to a drive other than your Windows drive and run the setup from there.  If you don't have your harddrive partitioned, you may want to consider doing so - it will offer both performance and reliability benefits.  To learn more about partitioning your harddrive, I recommend you read our article on primary vs. extended and logical partitions.

Installing Open Office Under Your User Account

If you prefer not to partition your harddrive and only have the Windows (usually the C:/ drive) on your computer, you can still install Open Office successfully by installing it in your user folder. 

• Copy the Open Office installation folder that was created on your desktop and place it in your Windows user folder (this is usually located at: c:/document and settings/user-name). 
• To make things easier, you may want to place them in a folder with an easy to remember name such as "ooinstall." 
• Next, browse to Start -> Run -> and type in "command"
• This will take you to your user folder
• Type "dir" to see a listing of directories
• Type "cd ooinstall" to access the ooinstall directory
• Type "setup.exe /a" to begin installation of Open Office (the /a does a network install - which is what you'll need to get Open Office working)
• When prompted for the network location, browse to your user folder and create a folder named "Open Office" or something similar.  This is where Open Office will be installed to.

Associating Open Office files with Open Office

Since we didn't use the admin installer Open Office files were not automatically associated with Open Office.  To create the assocation, run Open Office for the first time and select "select the program from a list" when prompted how to open the document.  Next, browse to your Open Office folder and select the "soffice" icon.  Finally, select Open Office from the list.  And if it's not already checked, you'll want to check "always use the selected program to open this kind of file."

Voila Open Office is now installed and associated with Open Office files.