LibreOffice Tuesday T&T: Windows Installation Issues

According to our estimates, worldwide there are around 150 million LibreOffice users on Windows. And when we say worldwide we mean worldwide, as according to the origin of downloads we have users in every continent including Antarctica.

As a consequence, we get a large amount of questions related to LibreOffice on Windows. Many of these questions are about the installation process, because there are several issues which prevent the user to get the expected positive user experience. Unfortunately, the majority of these questions are related to Windows issues and not to LibreOffice issues.

When a issue is related to Windows, the Microsoft operating system will show a specific message, under the form of either an error number (for instance, “Error 1303”) or a specific sentence (for instance, “The program can’t start because api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll is missing from your computer”).

Of course, over the years we have built a small knowledge base on the subject, and we have published the results on one page on the wiki, in the area of frequently asked questions: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/General_Installation_Issues_(Windows). Another useful resource is the Ask LibreOffice website (https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/questions/), where users can search for a solution.

The best resources, though, are provided by Microsoft, and are all multilingual, and are the Microsoft Support website (https://support.microsoft.com/) and the Microsoft Community website (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us). For instance, a search for “Error 1303” provides around 20 answers, with comments, on the Ask LibreOffice website, and hundreds or even thousands of answers on the two Microsoft websites.