❗ What the error means
Error starting Microsoft Word (C) (Must have at least Word 97 on this machine)
The error message is telling us what's wrong - Roof Wizard can't find MS Word.
This is possibly caused by a corruption of Word environment variables stopping Word from starting.
🔧 The fix
This fix has been used to rectify the issue.
RUN THE OFFICE REPAIR UTILITY TO FIX WORD 2016
Close Word and any other Office programs. ...
Press the Win+X keyboard shortcut. ...
Choose Control Panel.
Below the Programs heading, click the Uninstall a Program link. ...
Select Microsoft Office from the list of programs. ...
Click the Change button. ...
Choose Quick Repair.
Click the Repair button.
and Wait.
The Office Repair utility attempts to figure out what’s wrong. What happens next depends on whether anything is fixed. If something needs attention, obey the directions on the screen. If everything is fine, you see the Done Repairing message (even if nothing was actually wrong).
If the repair didn’t work, try again but choose Online Repair in Step 8. If that doesn’t work, consider reinstalling your MS Office installation.
📌 Background
The Roof Wizard software starts the Word and Excel software using OLE, which is Object Linked Embedding. In short, we do this not only to ensure that the software will start but also to ensure OLE is enabled within the EXE application. If not, nothing is going to work from this point forwards so it’s best to have it close out at this point - hence the error message.
See code below for Word and Excel:
Word
Excel
When Office 365 first came out, it did so without OLE.
Luckily for us Microsoft saw the error of their ways and included it. But, if you get this error, you have a version of Office 365 where Excel has OLE included in Excel.EXE but doesn’t have OLE included in Word.EXE. The only way around this really is for you to upgrade to a later version of Office 365.
It seems that the [Repair] option described above re-instates the OLE support.