I'm sure you've all had the annoying experience when you are typing in a Word document or an outlook email and all of a sudden the screen is filled with backwards P's - the paragraph marks. I've never been able to work out what triggers this to occur until today when I decided to find out after yet another helpdesk ticket came in asking how to turn this function off. (It is especially tricky in outlook as the button does not appear in the standard toolbars within outlook.)
I found that pressing ctrl, shift and 8 (or more correctly ctrl *) will toggle the paragraph mark status. I suspect that the keyboards are registering the ctrl key being held down at the same time as the shift 8 key is being pressed to get a * displayed in the text.
Note that you can find out what other shortcut keys take affect by right clicking an empty part of the toolbar, clicking customize, selecting the Options tab and then enabling "Show shortcut keys in Screen Tips" and then clicking ok to close the dialog boxes. Turning this on helped me determine the buttons to press.
Recently in Office Category
I needed to read a Word2007 document on my home computer this evening and had to download the following files to read the document -
- Word 2003 viewer - 12MB
- Word Viewer 2003 Service Pack 3 - 12MB
- Office 2007 compatability pack - 28MB
52MB of download and three installs seems a bit of an overkill to read one office document!
I had a remote user, working behind a vpn connection to the office log onto the pc for the first time (which was a hard job in itself - I had to use the dial up networking login to authenticate to the domain and cache credentials to the workstation). This user was having problems running outlook with the software prompting him to provide the location for the office source files with the error message "Error 1706. Setup cannot find the required files. Check your connection to the network, or CD-ROM drive. For other potential solutions to this problem, see C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\1033\Setup.hlp"
Entering the network installation location did not work. This issue is documented in KB Article 297834 which didn't help what so ever, the setup /fvm took forever to run but didn't work.
However, if I logged on as the administrator user outlook would run successfully. So I added the user to the administrators group and I still got the same error message.
Looking in the eventlog I got the generic error 1004, but I did get the message "Detection of product '{90110409-6000-11D3-8CFE-0150048383C9}', feature 'OutlookUserData', component '{8ADD2C9C-C8B7-11D1-9C67-0000F81F1B38}' failed. The resource 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Office\ 11.0\ Outlook\ UserData' does not exist.
Copying the registry entries for the admin user for the Office\11.0 tree didn't work either.
A search on google for 11.0\Outlook\UserData came up with the article kb0106250 on rangersuite. I modified the text file to only include the version 11 entries, ran it and outlook ran through the first time wizard and the user (and I) was very happy.
For completeness sake, the registry entries to fix this problem are in the extended entry.
For some reason, one of my (terminal) servers has started to show funky dialog boxes in office applications. Everything looks plain, like in vb3 days and the options dialog box in outlook is unusable as the dialog is too small for the content. Any ideas on what has caused this?
Wrong dialog box
Correct Dialog box - everything fits in the screen (although I snipped the bottom off)
Update - Mike - you are a genius. The funny thing is that I thought it was the fonts but at first glance it seemed ok. However, I compared the fonts in the appearance setting of the display applet in control panel and sure enough, the font settings were blank. A look at the Tahoma font in the font applet and it was 0 bytes - aha! Installed Tahoma again across the network and the fonts and dialog boxes are now back to normal. - Sir, I owe you a pint.
I've spent ages trying to work out how to modify a form in Word2007. This is because the bits that you need in the ribbon bar are not displayed by default. In order to fix this, Click the Microsoft Office Button , and then click Word Options. Click Popular and then select the Show Developer tab in the Ribbon check box, and then click OK.
You can get more help on form creation and design by going to Help / Creating Specific Documents / Forms
Tried to install the Office2007 cd and got told that I already had beta 2007 components installed (which is actually the Expression Beta) as per the error "Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s): The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies. Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup."
Several blogs later (funnily enough the first response in google was Scott's page which I already read on a daily basis) I followed the instructions at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928218/">kb928218 and removed the Expression Beta (which I had already removed from Add Remove programs and the My Uninstall program)
CA are doing a free trial of Vista Antivirus software. Thanks to Digitalfive which is a new blog I've added to my reading list even though i don't have Vista yet as I don't have a machine powerful enough to run it (apart from my home machine but that needs to be stable(ish)
I'm also sorely tempted to download the Office2007 beta now that the rush is over, but again I don't really have a machine to put it on - the main pc at home only has works - which is all I need on the machine, and the office pc is hands off. I also don't have access to an exchange server to put 2007 against, and you really need to make outlook your main mail client to get the best shot of testing it. I'm fairly happy with thunderbird, although I wish it wouldn't disable my extensions every time I upgrade to a newer version and I miss macro's.
It turns out that if Word does not spell check a document and you get a message that Word has spell checked parts of the document (sorry can't remember the exact error message) you can get Word to check the whole thing by selecting all the text (ctrl-A) and then going to the Tools menu, selecting Language (of all things) and then selecting and unselecting the option "Do not spell check selected text"
Took me quite a while to figure that one out as I was looking under spelling options and custom.dic's etc - not under languages!
...when you double click on them but will from the File/Open menu was a weird one that I hadn't come across before. However, following the instructions in a Google Groups posting where the tools | options | general | ignore other applications was unchecked and it worked. Very strange. Not sure why this has started to happen but it works - *shrug*
Office 2003 sp2 has been released along with sp2 for Visio 2003 and sp2 for OneNote 2003. That's going to take some investigation back at the office!
Update It's a 100+mb download for the full install or 50+mb for the intelligent download AND there is no uninstall feature.
Update2 There is a webcast on the 6th October about the outlook update.
I've got to do some more word template programming at the office and need to show people how it is done and how someone else can edit/create new macros and have them signed. It is fairly easy to do and rather than showing them how to do it they can read the document Using SelfCert to Create Digital Certificates in a Network and then I'll show them.
One of the laptops was prompting for ZF561402.CAB whenever one of the office apps was opened. The only thing that had changed was some sort of installation of frontpage2000 (for some unknown reason).
We were getting prompted for the office2003 cd, but when you put the disk in the drive it would still ask for the cd. Eventually solved it by putting a different copy of office2003 in the drive. Not sure what the difference is, but I know that the original cd used is the volume licence copy, yet I don't think the cd required was the volume licence key one.
I picked the toshiba up on Monday and it was nice to have it back. It seems to be behaving itself so far this week - I guess the real test will be when I use it on Sunday for powerpoint presentations again. (incidentally Ian, I tried openoffice last night and it didn't muck up the layout of the powerpoint presentation but it didn't launch hyperlinked ppt files in slideshow mode - more on that later after I've had a chance to play with it a bit more.)
I downloaded Ability Office 4 this afternoon to see what it was like. It is bundled with a laptop that I'm looking at getting for the church and rather than paying £100 for the educational version of Microsoft Office, I thought that I'd see whether Ability Presentation really could use the same format as the powerpoint files.
The good news is that it can read powerpoint files. The bad news is that the formatting of our "index" goes completely to pot with objects not lined up anymore and the hyperlinks to other files do not work in Ability and it doesn't look like there is the ability to put these hotspots in.
The other bad thing is that when you press F1 for help there is a glaring mistake at the bottom of the opening page - it reads "creating your fist presentation". Not a promising start.
I've not tried openoffice.org - guess that might be worth a look.
Not sure if this is a coincidence or not, but it looks like installing sp1 for office2003 managed to break Intravnews. In that the toolbar wasn't there and the only reference to it within outlook was the personal folder file opened. However, a quick repair of the installation and everything is hunkydory again.
I tried to open one of our mailmerge documents that I wrote some time ago in Word2003 and got the message "Opening This Will Run the Following SQL Command". This is to prevent you sending data to a malicious user when opening a word macro and can be disabled by following the instructions in KB article 825765. What this doesn't explain is why my line
.Destination = wdSendToNewDocumentnow comes back with a message "Run-time error 5852 Requested Object is not available". With Word2000 it comes up with a different error message, but on the same line.
Update It turns out this problem is caused by opening the document in word2003, changing a telephone number and then saving it again. I guess that whatever VBA is in office2003 doesn't like wdSendToNewDocument (or .Destination)
Update2 The fix is to create the registry entry as documented in Microsoft's KB 825765 and then edit the document. Thanks to the newsgroup posting>/a> which gave me the solution. No idea why the popup message should disable some word macro, but by putting that value in it worked!
The owner of Outlook Tips is shortly about to start a new tip list for onenote. Although this is not an application that I am using (yet) I am quite keen to try it - just need the time to load it on the pc at home!
I got the pukka version of office2003 today and installed it on the laptop and the desktop so I'm now a happy bunny again and I can read my emails with a decent preview and not download any spam pictures. The interesting thing in the EULA (which I bothered to read) actually says that I can install the software on my main pc AND on another portable device as long as I am the sole user of that device. Which is great as it means I can install on the desktop and the laptop and only need one licence for it. This EULA could actually make it cheaper for some companies to upgrade to this version of office as they could potentially only need half the number of licences that previous versions needed - if of course the company is indulgent enough to give everyone a desktop and a laptop.
I downloaded the office updates and was suprised to see only one spam filter update - I guess that the second filter update that came out a while ago is actually a culmalative one.
Speaking of patches - I've started to install the new Microsoft patches that came out yesterday and so far have not had any problems.
I wondered why the installation of Office2k3 didn't install icons on the desktop, especially with outlook, but apparently it's because this goes against Windows XP Certification. Adding a desktop icon can be done by adding a key to the registry. Thanks to Outlook-Tips mailing list
I installed a trial version of Office 2003 that runs out Feb 29th 2004. Will be interesting to see if I'm totally hooked on Outlook2k3 by then. First impressions are that it looks good. However I've vpn'ed into the office and connecting to outlook remotely 2 mins after activating the software online. The annoying thing is that I get a systray popup message saying that its trying to get email from my mailserver. I'm sure (i hope) that I can turn this off after all when you hit the "connect" button it does normally mean that you want to get email from the server so why tell you? Like I say this is posted a couple minutes after installation and I've not read any documentation, manuals, help files or menus - I'm a techie remember!
Sounds absurd, but apparently this can be done. By corrupting the PST equivalent of a FAT and then "fixing" it, the pointers to deleted items are recreated back in the pst and items deleted from the deleted items folder are restored. Obviously if you are using exchange then you just have to use the Recover Deleted items folder. Article is at techrepublic. Again I think registration is required. Basically replace characters 07 through to 013 (in hex!) with a space (20H), save the file and then repair it with scanpst. When I tried this the deleted items appeared in the main top level folder.
