dacs.doc electric

WOODY LEONHARD must be a thorn in Microsoft’s side. Author of numerous best-selling books on Microsoft products, including The Hacker’s Guide to Word for Windows and The Mother of all Windows 95 Books, he is nevertheless merciless when it comes to what he views as the “annoy-
ances” of the most recent Microsoft products. Woody’s new series (written with co-authors Lee Hudspeth and T.J. Lee) can be grouped under the rubric “Microsoft Annoyances.” Titles include
Office 97 Annoyances, Word 97 Annoyances, Excel 97 Annoyances ... you getthe idea.

Woody’s preface to Office 97 Annoyances sets the tone: “Microsoft keeps asking us all, ‘Where do you want to go today?’ ” Are they kidding? You know where you want to go today; we know where you want to go today; the only group that seems to be unclear on this issue is Microsoft. You want to get your work done, flip your PC’s power switch to that lovely OFF position, call it a day, and go home!

The series provides concrete suggestions and workarounds that will let you “get your work done” faster and more efficiently by fixing some of the shortcomings of the Office 97 products.

When Microsoft released Office 97, there was little if any provision for backward compatibility. This problem led to a brouhaha that eventually caused Microsoft to publicly apologize for the
“inconvenience” it had caused end users. Windows magazine went so far as to remove Outlook from its WinList of recommended products.

The Annoyances books tell you where to download the most recent patches and where to look for patches issued after the books were published. In particular, Microsoft has issued a converter that allows users to save Word 97 files in previous formats (wrdcnv97.exe at http://www.microsoft.com/word). The authors strongly recommend that you check www.microsoft.com/officefreestuff regularly for new patches and download them for products you use. Other sites are listed in the box concerning Microsoft sources.

Vital Changes

Each book in the series has an early chapter on “Vital Changes” that describes what default settings work best and which ones to turn off. These include:

• Disable Fast Find in Win 95. We’ve had nothing but trouble with it.
• Turn off FastSave in Word 97. It leads to bloated files and can cause text to disappear.
• Get some third-party anti-virus software (Norton, McAfee, Dr. Solomon’s, IBM). The anti-virus warning that Microsoft provides does nothing to prevent or fix viruses.
• How to avoid some of the vagaries of the AutoCorrect and Autoformat features.
• Turn on the Paragraph and Tab markers. This is strongly recommended; in Word, all formatting markers are hidden in the paragraph markers.
• Customize your startup folder and menu and work through various default settings so you can choose the ones you like (which may not be the same ones Bill Gates likes).
• Change the very useful Office Shortcut Bar to reflect options you use most often, including adding (gasp!) nonMicrosoft products to the bar.

Useful Suggestions

The books walk the user through modifying what they call the “demoware” toolbars that ship with Office 97 products (good for flashing demos, not much good for working) so that the options you use most frequently are displayed. They also include sections on realistically assessing
the danger from viruses (and how to combat them) and give you detailed suggestions concerning specific features. For example, the Office 97 book describes exactly how to run a Word mail merge
against Outlook information (it’s easy to make a mistake). It lists the programs and items contained on the CD-ROM that are not installed with a standard installation, as well as all ValuPak items.

The only way to disable pop-up tips for toolbar icons, we are told, is to do so from Excel. If you disable them in any other application, they are re-enabled any time you open Excel. If you’ve ever tried to do this without knowing this particular glitch, it can drive you crazy.

All suggestions are interspersed with running commentary, featuring expressions like “bunk,” “relatively brain dead,” “utterly useless but very sexy marketing garbage,” and so on. No doubt your favorites (once you get used to the style, which takes some doing) will correspond
to the parts of Microsoft products you find most annoying. My personal favorite is
the comment that VBA/Word “harbors more bugs than a Louisiana bayou.”

VBA Routines

Why bother with it? As usual, the authors are quite up front about this: “That’s an awfully good question,” they say. “The answer is, simply, that VBA/Word is so powerful so capable of overcoming Word’s most annoying problems” that everyone stands to benefit from using it.
Basically, Leonhard et al have a Dr. Strangelove approach to Office 97: Stop worrying and learn to love Microsoft.

Some of the VBA routines that are included in the books are powerful and extremely useful. More of them, available free on Woody’s wopr.com site, include a “ShowAll” routine that lists all of
Word’s built-in command names; a way to disable Word’s “float over” default; a macro to toggle between Excel’s formulas and results display, and a “shape grabber” macro that allows you to select more than one shape in PowerPoint.

For all Word’s power, if learning a programming language (which is what VBA is) is a prerequisite to making it truely productive, I’m not at all convinced that this is an acceptable tradeoff for most users. But if you are using Office 97 or any of its pieces on a regular basis, the Annoyances books can make your life a lot easier.

The series is published by O’Reilly and is available in (some) bookstores, from amazon.com, or from oreilly.com.