I recently had a long term collaboration with a number of colleagues, where part of what we did was produce, edit, and agree upon finalized versions of text. We applied various formatting such as color, cursive, and bold to track the status of specific text blocks. At the end of it all, we needed to collate the disparate pieces of text into a single document.
(more…)Tag: Word
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Outlook: Mail merge
I have previously written about one of my many responsibilities; contacting users whose login credentials have shown up in breach lists. While the pertinent results of the breach files are delivered to me in a flat file, I use Excel’s Text to Columns feature to separate logins (usually email addresses) from the password. While this might take a little fiddling with the delimiters, it is worth it to ensure that you have a good basis on which to work.
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MS Office: Pin items
Many companies, my employer included, uses spreadsheets on a more or less consistent basis in order to track such things as vacation planning and KPI reporting. For me, as an employee, keeping track of these spreadsheets can, from time to time, be a bit annoying. Much to my surprise, at some point in the past few years, Microsoft added a pin item feature to MS Office.
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Word: “Track changes” shows up as “Author” instead of author name
A user called in, reporting that Word’s Track changes-function tagged her as “Author”, instead of her name. I opened a remote session, and started out by confirming that everything else was working correctly, and that her name had been set as the author in the settings for Microsoft Word. Stalling for time while I researched the issue, I found that it seemed to be a problem affecting particular documents. Knowing this set me on the path to the solution, as follows:
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Change author name and initials in Word
A while back, a user called in, asking me how she could change the name and initials that Word used when filling in Author and when showing who had made a comment. Not having had to do that for some time, I quickly researched it, finding it was simple enough to do. In order to avoid having to research it in the future, here’s how: (more…)
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Resolving problems opening Word documents from Windows Explorer
If you have a problem opening Word documents from the Windows Explorer, the problem probably lies in how the document files are registered with the operating system. The first thing to try in correcting the problem is to unregister and reregister Word with Windows. From the command line, use the following command:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\winword.exe" /unregserver
The quotes are necessary, but you may need to change the path so it reflects the location of the winword.exe file on your system. (You can use Windows’ Search tool to locate the path to the winword.exe file.) The /unregserver switch “unhooks” all the references to Word in the Windows Registry. You should then, immediately, use the following command:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\winword.exe" /regserver
This command causes Word to rewrite all its Registry keys and to reassociate itself with document and template files. -
Unable to open Excel documents from Windows Explorer
Over the last year or so I’ve had at least fifteen users complain that when they double-click an Excel document in Windows Explorer, Excel opens, but no workbook. They then have to open the document manually in Excel.
Here’s how to resolve this problem:
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Microsoft Word – generating a new normal.dot-file
I recently had a user call in with a problem; whenever she’d open a word-document, word would flash an error message, then to open in safe mode.
Normal.dot is the default template file in Microsoft Word. Because it contains a lot of customization settings, it is prone to corruption. Thus, many problems experienced while working in Microsoft Word can be attributed to this file. The most common fix is to force generate a new, clean version of this troublesome file. Here’s how: (more…) -
Fatal Error when starting Microsoft Word 2007
My employer is slowly but surely implementing Microsoft Office 2007. One of the errors we’ve encountered has been a fatal error. It seems to be caused by one of the following two things:
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