Visio & Office Versions – Troubleshooting Fun

For some time I’ve been using Visio 2007. It’s worked fine, but it won’t let me import .dwg files (CAD files, if you didn’t know) that have been made recently. So, finally, we buckled down the budget and upgraded to Visio 2016. And, well, things got screwy.

I ended up with this error as I tried to install Vision:

I’ve never dealt with Error Code 30029-39 before. Turns out it was something simple, overlooking a basic issue.

Our version of Office was 2013. Now, I’ve been using Visio 2007 with Office 2013 just fine, no problems. But Office 2016 doesn’t play well with other versions of Office. I should’ve checked Office version compatibility.

So, now I was left with a choice:

  1. Upgrade the rest of Office to 2016 – or –
  2. Find some other way

In the spirit of cheapness, I spent time looking at ways to force Windows 10 to let me have 2 versions of Office. And, well, nope. I did find some ways to use a VM client, like Windows built in Hyper-V, but it started to get to a high butt-pain threshold and I went with option 1).

There are times that being able to get back to work is worth quite a bit.