Why does AcroPlot not work with my Office 2010?

AcroPlot is drives Microsoft Office through an out of process means called COM or ActiveX. In previous versions of Office this was never a problem.

But staring with Office 2010 Microsoft creates two types of Office installations. The old full MSI installation and a newer technology they call Click-to-Run which downloads and installs Office in a virtualized environment.

AcroPlot functions perfectly fine with the full install of Microsoft Office which is probably what the majority of business users install.

But the Click-to-Run version is another story. The downside of the Click-to-Run version is that by design it does not allow outside programs to drive Office so we result in doing a default Windows PrintTo function similar to what would happen if you right click on a Word file in Windows Explorer and do the Print To option. This often works fine but it doesn't always give us 100% control over the output like we can with driving Office directly.

For more information and options to install the full version see the following Microsoft Article.

Click to read Microsoft KB Article #982431 - Office 2010 Click-to-Run compatibility with add-ins.

Microsoft also has the following article to tell if you have the Click-to-Run version installed by looking at the registry if you are comfortable using the Registry Editor.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff522355.aspx