While working on a client’s machine today I ran into a kind of strange issue. They have 64 bit Windows, but have stuck with 32 bit office and no matter what I tried I couldn’t get the BI Publisher tool bar to work at all…

Every time I installed BI Publisher Desktop and went into word I would see the following situation when looking in the Word plugins:

BI Publisher Template Builder for Word is in the Inactive Application Add-Ins section

Looking at the Manage COM Add-ins details, I could see the Template Builder, but had the following error.

Load Behavior: Not loaded. A runtime error occurred during the loading of the COM Add-in.

Various blogs suggested various fixes (Like Tim Dexter’s excellent post here: https://blogs.oracle.com/xmlpublisher/entry/template_builder_woes_1 ), but they appeared to suggest that you needed MS Visual Studio to get things to work.

After a bit I opened up an SR with Oracle and eventually we figured out that you can install the following: MS Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime to get the necessary Visual Studio parts so that the Template Builder will work.

After installing that, everything worked like it should have.

Hopefully this will help someone some day…