Hands on: Hyperactive hyperlinks

Here’s a piece of weirdness I’ve been investigating with our spreadsheet columnist, Stephen Wells. And since we couldn’t decide whether this was a Word or Excel problem, it has wound up here.

As you doubtless know, you can put hyperlinks to a file on your hard disk into an Excel Worksheet or Word Document. If you click on such a link (Control & click in some versions of Word) then the file will open in its associated program. Except, as reader Geoff Legget found, it didn’t.

Geoff had a database of about 4,500 photos in Excel, with a hyperlink to each one. He had set Irfanview as the default program for all images, and opening any image from Windows XP Explorer did so in Irfanview.

Excel and Word, however, opened the linked images in Microsoft Photo Editor, which Geoff found rather annoying, especially as the latter defaulted to showing a small corner of the full-size picture rather than Irfanview’s scaled-to-window version.

Other users have reported a similar problem in that linked images open in Internet Explorer, each in a separate instance.

So, having inserted a few image hyperlinks into one of my own documents, I found I had a similar problem to Geoff. Some files that normally opened in the Windows Picture and Fax viewer were going to Paint Shop Pro when hyperlinked.

After a fairly thorough look at file associations in Explorer and in the Registry, I was getting nowhere. So, I asked around and discovered the following Registry tweak.

First, create a System Restore point, then Start, Run regedit. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\Internet and create a new DWORD value named ForceShellExecute. Double-click on this and give it a value of one, then close the Registry editor.

You will probably have other version numbers of Office as Registry keys. I was using Office 2003 and had keys for 8.0, 9.0 and 11.0. Adding the key to 11.0 didn’t work, but adding it to 9.0 caused the hyperlink associations to correspond with the Explorer associations. This should also work for Office 2000 and Office XP.

A related annoyance is that when you try to open a hyperlinked Tiff file you get a warning that ‘Some files can contain viruses or otherwise be harmful to your computer. It is important to be certain that this file is from a trustworthy source’. Sound advice though this may be, it gets rather tedious to read it and confirm every time you open a link to one of your own trusted Tiffs.

This only happens in Office 2003, and this time you don’t need any Registry editing. In Explorer, go to Tools, Folder Options and turn to the File Types tab. Scroll down to Tiff, and click the Advanced button. In the ‘Edit File Type’ dialogue that appears, clear the ‘Confirm open after download’ box. OK out of this dialogue, then close folder options.

There is a further catch here, and it’s one of Microsoft’s finest. If you’ve changed the file association from what Microsoft considers to be the default (usually Microsoft Document Imaging for Tiffs), then you don’t get an Advanced button – you only get a Restore button to return to the default association.

Here’s what you do. Click on that Restore button, and you’ll get the Advanced button back and can do the necessary as per the previous paragraph. Now click on the Change button and select the application you want as the default. Make sure the ‘Always use…’ box is ticked and click OK. You’ll be back with your chosen association, but the ‘Confirm open…’ setting will stick, and you won’t get the warning message anymore.

Paranoia corner
If you log on to a secure website, you will often find that as well as a normal username and password you have to enter several letters chosen at random from a further password or item of ‘memorable information’. You can’t type these in – you need to choose them from a list.

Though this may be irksome, there is a reason for it. Keylogging software (or hardware) can intercept everything you type, but it’s far more difficult – though not impossible – to intercept mouse movements.

So, if this is a possible worry in other situations – entering credit card details, for example – then why not try the Windows On-Screen Keyboard (OSK)? You’ll find it in the Accessories, Accessibility section of the Start Menu.

Note that you can set it to be ‘Always on top’ in the Settings menu and that you don’t even have to click on the keys – there’s a ‘hover’ option. You do, however have to switch focus to the target window before you start using the OSK.

Taming Updates
Automatic Windows XP Updates are a fine thing – when they behave properly. Generally, I find the process completely painless. There are a number of ways you can tame Updates, via Control Panel, Automatic Updates or via the XP Security centre. I find the most useful option is to download the updates automatically, but ask before installing.

One major annoyance is when an update needs a reboot and Windows puts up a little notice telling you about this. You happen to be rather busy, so you tell it to come back later, which it does with annoying regularity – every five minutes by default.

Other users have reported that Windows has rebooted while they were away from the PC and that they lost data. I haven’t had this happen, but then I always hit the save button on anything I’m working on before taking a break. However, I have had the nuisance of having to relaunch applications, open files, find the web pages I had open and so on.

If you suspect this has happened, rather than a power failure or a poltergeist, look in the event log for items that have Windows Update Agent as the Event Source and 22 as the Event ID.

It will come as no surprise that there are Registry settings to control this behaviour, but it’s not a simple matter to set them up directly, as it involves creating two keys and seven values. The smart way is to be logged on with admin status and use the Group Policy editor (Start, Run, gpedit.msc).

First you need to burrow down through Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Windows Update.

Before any other settings will take effect, you need to make sure ‘Configure Automatic Updates’ is enabled. Even if you have done this through Control Panel it may not appear here, so double-click on the entry and click the Enabled option. The settings below should now reflect your choices in Control Panel – rectify if not so.

Next, open the ‘No auto-restart…’ item and enable that. This will prevent Windows automatically rebooting if anyone is logged in. Finally, you can also tweak the nag frequency – double-click on ‘Delay restart…’ and you’ll find you can wind this up to 30 minutes.

Cache and carry
Since the dawn of time Internet Explorer has ‘cached’ images and other content from websites in the Temporary Internet Files folder – the idea being that if you revisit a page you don’t have to download its contents all over again. But if you’ve moved to Mozilla, then it’s not that easy to find the cache.

In the current version, 2.0, you’ll find it in your profile under Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\profile.name\Cache. However, that is quite a journey. I make it nine levels down from ‘My Computer’ and when you get there you are in for a disappointment, as the files don’t have meaningful names or any extensions.

Fortunately, there’s a much smarter way to do this. Just type ‘about:cache’ in the Thunderbird address bar and hit Enter. You’ll get info on the size and number of entries in both the disk cache and the memory cache.

You can expand these to see the details of each entry – URL, size, modification and expiry dates and fetch count – the number of times the item has been retrieved from the cache. Two more clicks will retrieve the item for view in the browser, so you can see what exactly your kids have been up to.

Here’s another Firefox tip – you don’t have to go to the Edit menu or even use two fingers (Control & F) to do a ‘Find in page’. Just type a forward slash followed by the text you’re looking for. As you add letters, Firefox will home in, highlighting the found string; for example, typing /windo might make it jump from wit to wine to wind to Windows.

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