The Problem
Every time Microsoft releases a new version of Microsoft Office they make a lot of changes “under the hood” as far as the components that it requires as well as how it integrates with outside products. Microsoft doesn’t make this easy on developers.
When a new version of Microsoft Office comes out, developers that have products that integrate closely with Office will have to reconfigure parts of their program. This can be complicated if you are supporting multiple versions of Microsoft Office.
So, what happens if you have QuickBooks with Microsoft Office 2013, and you try to run QuickBooks Statement Writer? Often you’ll get this window saying that additional setup is required, and that it cannot find a supported version of Microsoft Office.
Click Continue and you get another warning, and you can’t get by this point.
Note that if you have BOTH Office 2010 and Office 2013 installed you will see something different, and if you push on you might get QuickBooks Statement Writer to export to
Excel 2013, but that only occurs if you have both Office versions installed.
Microsoft Office 2013 Variations
We also have to talk about the “variations” of Microsoft Office 2013. We have:
- Traditional versions, the desktop versions that you install on your Windows computer
- Office Online versions, which can be run through a web browser
- Click-to-Run versions, which are essentially the traditional version that you can download to temporarily run on someone’s computer without consuming one of your licenses.
Each of these work differently as far as their ability to work with outside programs. We will only be looking at the Traditional version that you fully install on your Windows computer, leaving out the online and click-to-run versions. If you are using the other versions there isn’t any way that we’ll get them to work with QuickBooks that I’m aware of.
The Fix
I’ve been talking to an Intuit support engineer who came up with a fix, which Intuit has finally endorsed and published in KB Article HOW24547. This article talks about QuickBooks 2015, but if you run into this problem with QuickBooks 2014 or QuickBooks 2013 the same fix should work (no hope for QB 2012 or older). Here’s the process, which I’ll demonstrate using QuickBooks 2015 (Enterprise Solutions) on a 32 bit system.
Note: Intuit staff are trying to come up with a “batch” file that will simplify this process – at the time I’m writing that they haven’t gotten it to work the way they would like. If they can get it to work they’ll update the KB article.
First, close QuickBooks if you have it open.
We have to locate some files that may be in “hidden” Windows folders. By default, Microsoft Windows hides certain folders that would contain information that a user wouldn’t normally be interested in – program folders, special folders that applications use to hold settings, and so forth. You can change your settings to show these – here’s what I do in Windows 7 (there may be variations in other systems).
In Windows Explorer, click the Organize dropdown and select Folder and search options.
In Folder Options click the View tab, and select Show hidden files, folders, and drives. Then click Apply and close this window.
Now locate the folder C:SERS\USERNAME\APPDATAocal\intuit\statement writer\. note that username will be the name of the windows user account you are logged in with (“charlie” in my example). we are looking for the “iswprefs.ini” file (the file type might not show, unless you turn that feature on in the folder options also).
we want to edit this file – in most systems you should be able to just double-click on the file name to open it in notepad. once you have it open, you want to change the value “true” to “false” in the line that i highlight below.
close the file and save your changes.
now we are going to look for another folder. the name of this folder will vary depending on several things: the year of quickbooks you are working with and whether the operating system is 32 bit or 64 bit. the folder name for a quickbooks 2015 installation on a 32 bit system would be c:\program files\intuit\statement writer 2015 .
- if you are working with a different year of quickbooks change the “2015” to the appropriate year
- if you are working with a 64 bit version of microsoft windows then “program files” will be “program files (x86)”
in this folder there are several installer and application files that you are going to run by double-clicking on them, in the following sequence (again note that the file “type” might not be showing). it is very important that you run the proper files (several names are similar) and that you run them in this order. each step should only take a minute to run (except one), and you will generally just accept the default answers (as well as checking boxes to agree to licenses).
note that after some steps you may see this warning message – if you do, just click this program installed correctly.
run each of these in turn:
- o2010pio.msi
- vstor.exe
- vstor30.exe – if you have an option to “repair” or “uninstall”, select the “repair” option.
- vstor30sp1-kb949258-x86.exe
- vtor40_x64.exe if you are on a 64 bit system or vstore40_x86.exe if you are on a 32 bit system – if you have an option to “repair” or “uninstall”, select the “repair” option.
- go to intuit support kb article how13974 and download the quickbooks component tool. run this tool – note that this can take awhile to run (about 10 minutes on my test system, your results may vary). note that this intuit kb article is a different link than what is provided in the intuit instructions for this fix, but the component you download is the same one.
- reboot your computer.
- open quickbooks and try quickbooks statement writer again.
success!