Cannot open this item. The text formatting command is not available. It may not be installed correctly. Install Microsoft Office Outlook again

outlook1000

Symptoms

When you try to open an email message in Microsoft Outlook 2013, Outlook 2010, or Outlook 2007, you receive the following error message:

Cannot open this item. The text formatting command is not available. It may not be installed correctly. Install Microsoft Outlook again.
Microsoft Solution for this avilable

Some say that computer problems happen at the worst times. I’m not sure that is true, but I won’t argue. Without warning, my Outlook email stopped working last week. I could receive email, but I couldn’t open any items. Instead, I saw an error message that read “Cannot open this item. The text formatting command is not available. It may not be installed correctly. Install Microsoft Office Outlook again.” Fortunately, my main email address runs in parallel so I wasn’t totally hosed.

For most of my Outlook email problems, I can work my way to a solution. This one had me stumped although I had some functionality running Outlook in safe mode.

To start Microsoft Outlook in safe mode,

  1. For Windows 7, click Start. For Windows 8 or Windows 8.1, press your Windows key and then the X key, then choose Run from the popup menu.
  2. Type Outlook /safe in the Run dialog box.

Prior to calling Microsoft Support, I did a query on the error message to see what solutions had been suggested. While I don’t know the cause of the problem, I found 3 suggestions that might solve the problem.

(For me Suggestion 3 worked)

Suggestion 1: Reinstall Microsoft Outlook.

If the developer offers a solution on an error message, that’s where I start. Let’s face it, they have the inside advantage. In my case, I recently installed some Windows patch files and thought they may have contributed to the problem.

Suggestion 2: Create a New Outlook Profile

From what I read, this procedure fixed the problem for many folks. This was the first thing the Microsoft technician suggested.  SlipStick has a good tutorial on this.

Like the first suggestion, this one didn’t fully resolve my problem. It appeared to work and then the error message reappeared. Again, I had to call Microsoft.

Suggestion 3: Close Outlook and Rename 4 .DAT files

The third time was a charm as the saying goes. This tech rep offered a different solution from his peers. In my case, this solution worked.

There were four .dat files that were renamed so the originals were still around if needed.

  • outcmd.dat
  • frmcache.dat
  • views.dat
  • extend.dat

When Outlook restarted, it created new versions of those files.

As a result of this fix, I did lose some custom view and toolbar settings, but I think it was worth the cost. It’s was much easier for me to recreate those settings than to be without my email. And yes, I’m still catching up on email inquiries if you sent me something.

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