Pack up your troubles

Take a look at what’s inside the Microsoft Office Update kit bag

In recent months we’ve seen a profusion of Microsoft Service Packs, with Vista SP1, XP SP3, Office 2007 SP1 and Office 2003 SP3.

The last of these is an agglomeration of previous updates (which most users will already have installed via Windows or Office Update), improvements to stability developed in response to user error reporting and a number of new security features. This last, in Microsoft’s tough talk, “represents a major evolution in security for Office 2003. It further hardens the office suite against potential attacks and security threats”.

There are several ways of obtaining the Service Pack. The one recommended by Microsoft is via Windows Update. Windows XP and 2000 users can also use Office Update. You can also download the pack as an executable file of 117MB. This has the advantage that you can save the file and subsequently install it on other PCs without further downloads.

But be warned, there is no way of uninstalling this or other Office 2003 Service Packs. You would need to remove Office entirely, then reinstall. In theory it should be possible to remove the Service Pack via System Restore, but Microsoft makes no mention of this and, in any case, Restore Points have a limited life.

We’ll concentrate on changes that impact Word, but be aware that other Office components are also affected. One casualty is the ‘Fast saves’ option (Tools, Options, Save). These, instead of amalgamating changes to a document in a logical manner, append them to the document.

This has several repercussions ­ – it can lead to bloated files and the inclusion of deleted text that, though hidden from Word, may still be visible with a text editor. In addition, it doesn’t save much time. We’ve long advocated turning this off and it was removed from Word 2007, so this is good news.

However, Microsoft hasn’t made a very thorough job of it ­ the checkbox is still present, though we are informed it is no longer functional (see picture). Administrators can allow or disallow .com add-ins, although this requires some Registry or Group Policy editing. There are minor changes to the behaviour of Document Imaging.

The default printer driver is set to the TIFF format, but TIFF and MDI files will no longer open by default in Document Imaging, and you will no longer be able to compress TIFFs using JPEG compression. Although there is no workaround to that last restriction, it is possible to reset the default behaviour of TIFF and MDI files via Windows Explorer folder options.

The real crunch, however, as some readers have already found out the hard way, is that SP3 denies access to certain file types. These include Corel Draw (CDR) files, which may not be too much of a drawback, and Word for Windows version 1 and 2 documents.

So, if you have some Word files that have been lurking on your hard disk since 1994 or earlier you may not be able to open them as “opening and saving these file types may pose a risk to you”.

This may seem somewhat dramatic, not to say surreal, to many Word users who hitherto have lost little sleep over the revenge of the ancient killer documents, but Microsoft is either deadly serious or playing an elaborate practical joke on us. Fortunately, this is reversible.

If you go here you’ll find downloadable Registry patches or, for real hands-on enthusiasts, instructions for creating your own. So if you’ve kept your Office 2003 installation updated, don’t have stability problems, are not afraid of Word 1 or 2 documents and can turn off Fast Saves all by yourself, there’s little incentive to install SP3.

If, on the other hand, you’re installing Office 2003 from scratch, then SP3 provides a handy way of updating it in one hit. Note that SP3 incorporates the two previous Service Packs. You’ll find further details of SP3, together with the download links here.

Content Controls
Last month’s foray into Word 2007 Building Blocks, mentioned, in passing, ‘type here’ boxes. If, for example, you select a cover page from the gallery, you’ll find formatted placeholders for titles, subtitles and document abstract. Click on any of these and you can insert your own text, which will replace the placeholder text while retaining the latter’s formatting.

You also get similar boxes for dates, but in this case you can click beside the ‘Pick the date’ box and use a little pop-up calendar. These are officially titled Content Controls, and you may want to try creating your own. First, if the Developer tab isn’t visible, you need to enable it from Word Options, Popular. Next, turn to the Developer tab and in the Controls panel you’ll see eight buttons on the left.

If these are greyed out, this is because you are working in ‘Compatibility Mode’ ­ ie the Word 2003 and earlier DOC file format. You’ll need to save your document in the DOCX format ­ or start a new one ­ to enable the buttons. Let’s take a simple example of creating a cover page. First, click the top left button in the Controls panel ­ this creates a Rich Text control.

You’ll see a box with a handle to the left containing the text ‘Click here to enter text’. Do just that ­ for instance ‘Type your title here’. You can enclose it in square brackets, as per the supplied cover pages, but this is not mandatory, it just serves to emphasise that this is a placeholder. You can then click the handle to select all the text and format in the normal way, or right-click to use the formatting mini-toolbar.

Repeat the process somewhere else on the page to get a name control ­eg ‘Type your name here’, and format to suit. Finally, with the insertion point at a third location, click on the date button ­ second from the left on the bottom row. This will give you a box containing ‘Click here to enter a date’. Change the text if you want to and format as before.

So now you have Content Controls for title, name and date. What can you do with this? First, you can select all (Ctrl and A) then turn to the Insert Ribbon, open the Cover Page Gallery and ‘Save selection to Cover Page Gallery’. Alternatively, you could save the document as a DOTX template. In either case, subsequent users can use the controls in exactly the same way as those in the supplied cover pages.

You may have noticed that when you pick a date using the control, it comes out in dd/mm/yyyy format. You may want to change this. So, open the template (or cover page building block) and turn once more to the Developer tab. Click on the Design Mode button, top right of Controls. Now right-click on the date control, and you’ll see Properties has been added to the context menu.

Select this, and you’ll see you can choose from a variety of date formats, or specify your own. And this is how Microsoft has done the clever stuff with some of the cover pages where the date and year have different formatting, such as the Annual cover. In fact, there are two date controls ­ one has the format MMMM dd, which just gives the month (spelled out) and day.

The other is formatted as yyyy, which just returns the year.

Word for free
Did you know you can get Microsoft Word absolutely free? And it’s only a 3.4MB download? Is there a catch? Well, it’s not the latest version. In fact, it’s not even Word for Windows, but you can download Word 5.5 for Dos (or OS/2) by clicking here. This will start the download automatically ­ – make sure that you save, rather than open or run the file.

Having downloaded the file, Wd55_ben.exe, create a temporary folder and move the file there. You can then run the file, which is a self-extracting Zip file, and which will create more than 300 other files in the same folder ­ – which is why you definitely don’t want to run it from the Desktop.

Having done this, run Setup.exe and follow the prompts ­ – by default it will install in C:\Word but you can change this as long as you stick to 8.3 file and folder names. Bear in mind that you need to select items in the prompt lists with the arrow keys, not the mouse. Having done this, run Word.exe, and you’re off.

You get a semi-Wysiwyg view of your document, mouse support, multiple documents, a spelling checker, a thesaurus and macros. Why pay more?