If you have MS Office 2010 installed and wants to install SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius Enterprise/Engage 2008), this post is interesting for you.

When you start the installation of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards you will get the following message:

This means you can only install SAP Crystal Dashboard Design 2008 if you have MS Office 2007 or earlier. An alternative is to uninstall MS Office 2010 and install MS Office 2007, after this you can successfully install SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards without errors. Finally you can upgrade your MS Office version to MS Office 2010.

If you don’t want to uninstall MS Office 2010, you can modify the installation file of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.

Step 1 – Download & Install:
Download and install the program InstEd. With this program we can modify the MSI installation file.

Step 2 – Find the MSI file:
Find the file “Xcelsius.msi”, you can find this file in the following folder “DATA_UNITS\Xcelsius\package“.

Step 3 – Create a backup and open:
First create a backup of your msi file. It can be happen that the file is “read-only”, you can change this by clicking with your right-mouse button and select properties. Uncheck the box read-only and click OK. Then open the file with the program InstEd.

Step 4 – Hack the MSI file:
In InstEd under Tables you can locate LaunchCondition. Once highlighted you will see a condition checking for office versions. Replaced the text with one of the other conditions of “Privileged OR Installed” but the trick is that the length of the text must be exactly the same or the byte count of the msi will change and will not run. So copy the original office check text into notepad and on the next line down I copied the “Privileged OR Installed” text and then I added spaces until the second line was exactly the same length as the one above it. Last I copied that second line and replaced the office condition text in the InstEd tool and saved it.

Step 5 – Install SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards:
Closed InstEd and the install ran fine and Xcelsius seems to work just fine as well. To install, you can open the msi file directly.

Good luck!

The same “hack” will also work with SAP BusinessObjects Live Office.