Figure 1: Derailing the AutoFormatting Juggernaut
by Woody Leonhard and T. J. Lee
You've bought Word 95 (a.k.a. Word 7.0) or Office 95 and you need to get Word installed. And if you're like us, you'd like to get back to work and not spend the rest of your life wrestling with all the choices you can make that will really influence how well you can work with the new beast - and more than a few "gotchas" Microsoft forgot to mention.
It's a fair bet that you've been using Word 6 and are perhaps a bit nervous moving up to what is essentially a full left of decimal upgrade. So, how best to install the new beastie?
First, you'll want to put it in a new location. Or in Windows 95-speak, a new folder. Office 95 will create a new home for Word like C:\MSOffice\Winword (assuming you're installing to the C: drive). We recommend that you not install over your version of Word 6, but instead keep them both on your computer for a while. Oh sure, Microsoft says the file formats are 100% compatible - you can open any Word 6 document with Word 95, and vice versa. And that is mostly true. But the mostly part is a bit troubling. While documents move easily back and forth between Word 95 and the previous version of Word, templates do not translate between versions. Beware!
Word 95 translates Word 6 template macros - when the prior version template is opened - from the old version of WordBasic to the new version of WordBasic. If you save the template the changes are written to disk and there you are. At this point the macros are probably belly up if you try to open that template and run the revised macros in Word 6. There is no method to reverse the translation process to go back the other way. Fun stuff, huh?
This is not some rare happenstance that only affects you if you have rolled your own WordBasic procedures. Take any of the templates that were shipped in the box with Word 6 and open them in Word 95, save them, and bang! Your template is almost guaranteed not to work at this point back in Word 6. When you click Yes to Word 95's "Save changes to document templates?" prompt, keep in mind that it's a one way trip.
Keep Word 6 available until you get all your old templates converted and are sure you've made a full transition to Word 95. This includes not needing to send any templates to users or customers who are still running Word 6.
Fans of the Underground Guide to Word for Windows and the Underground Guide to Microsoft Excel (both Addison Wesley) know we're big fans of customizing - changing the toolbars so they work the way you work, creating custom macros to solve common problems, and so forth. Power to the user, right on. Well, of all the Office applications, Word was, and still is, the easiest to customize and puts the most incredibly powerful and flexible options in the hands of you, the user.
That said, we really hate some of Word 95's new "features," and we want to turn them off immediately! We don't like it when a word processor thinks it's smarter than we are... whether it is or not. These are the worst of the features, the ones that really get in my way when we're typin' like a-ringin' a bell:
Given that frame of reference some of these new-fangled features in Word 95 make us nuts. We're talking about the new Intelli-nonsense stuff that Microsoft touts. There's just something fundamentally obnoxious about a word processor that thinks it's smarter than its owner. Okay, we like the AutoCorrect feature, but we can exert a modicum of control over this feature and make it work the way we want it to. It's these other all or nothing features that get our goat. Like when Word:
... decides that just because a paragraph is started with a "1." what we meant to do was create a numbered list, and automatically sticks numbered formatting on all subsequent paragraphs. For a lousy numbered list, we'll click the "1-2-3" button on the toolbar as the WinGgods intended. After all, that's what it's there for, right?
... decides that a really well-constructed sentence fragment is in reality a heading - and goes ahead and applies formatting that it deems suitable. When we want a heading, we'll just bloody well apply the appropriate style or formatting, thank you very much.
... decides almost any non-alphabetic character at the beginning of a paragraph is an indication that this is going to be a bulleted list. We often sign things with an em-dash followed by our first name or some suitable moniker, and if we hit Enter after that little signature doodad, say, to put in a P.S., the em-dash turns into a stupid bullet! Tarnation. If we want a bullet, we'll click on the bullet button on the toolbar.
... decides that any paragraph starting with a handful of underscores or equal signs is supposed to be a "border" paragraph. Admittedly this may be a bit subjective, but the Format/Border menu is so easy to use, Word should just leave its mitts off.
... decides to replace ordinals like "1st" with its weird rendition of a couple of superscript characters, e.g., 1st. Oh, sure, superscripting is sexy, but it's more bother than it's worth when you have to back up and start typing after the "st" - the superscript formatting affects the characters you type. Like this: 2ndtry to back up and type immediately after a superscript. What a pain!
To rid yourself of the worst of the new features, click on Tools, then Options, and bring up the AutoFormat tab. Make sure the AutoFormat As You Type button is checked and clear all of these check boxes: Headings, Borders, Bulleted Lists, Numbered Lists, Ordinals. See Figure 1.
Figure 1: Derailing the AutoFormatting Juggernaut
By the way, almost all of Woody's old customizing tips for Word 6 carry across directly to Word 95, too. It's well worth the effort to scan the first couple of chapters of the Underground Guide to Word and make those changes to Word 95.
The new preview capabilities for both the File/Open and the Insert/Picture dialogs are pretty kewl (that's one full coolness level above the plain old "cool"). Kewl, yes, but slower than molasses in January.
When you encounter one of these preview dialogs you wait while the first file found in the folder is displayed in the preview frame. Change folders and wait again. You wait because until the preview is displayed your system sits there and ignores your mouse clicks, keyboard keys presses, etc. You just have to wait. Period.
There are several solutions. One is to create blank documents called _empty.doc (note the underscore as the first character in the filename) and put them in all the document folders you commonly use. Similarly, create tiny, empty pictures called _empty.bmp (use Windows 95 Paint to create 'em) and put them in all the picture folders you commonly use. The underscore ensures that those files will appear first on your File/Open and Insert/Picture dialogs, and that Word will take a minimal amount of time rendering their previews.
Another solution is to not have the dialog box try to display a preview at all. There are three buttons on the File/Open and Insert/Picture dialogs: List, Details, Properties, and Preview. Click the List or Details buttons and see if you can live with that. You can always click the Preview button when you actually want to preview the selected file. Just remember to click another button before leaving the dialog box.
You'll be amazed at the performance improvement - yours, not necessarily the program's.
Finally we should discuss WordMail. If you are using Exchange you'll have a chance when installing Word to allow Word to be the message center for all the email you send and receive. Works great too, but...
Yeah, there's another "but." The problem with using Word as your Exchange word processor (this being the "WordMail" feature) is that Exchange does some very strange things with Word. Exchange starts a hidden session of Word on your computer whenever you start a new message. And it is not unknown for Exchange to neglect to shut down this hidden copy of Word. This plays havoc with Word in a number of ways. Globally loaded templates cannot be opened in the visible instance of Word if a hidden instance is floating around somewhere. That includes Normal.Dot as well. Oy!
Bottom line: avoid running Word while WordMail is active.
So how can you tell if a phantom copy of WordMail is lurking about? Well, you could hit Ctrl+Alt+Del before you start Word and see if Word is listed as a running application. Or you could run Msinfo32.exe and select Applications Running and see if Winword.exe is listed. Finally, if want something that requires less overt action on your part you can set up Word to give you a hint whether or not a hidden version is currently running.
Use one of the other methods to verify that WordMail has not been left lurking about. Then start Word. The trick is to put something in Word's Autoexec macro that acts as a trigger to let you know there's no hidden version loaded. When a hidden instance is already loaded and you start Word 95 it will not run its Autoexec macro. So by omission you know that things are amiss.
For example, create or edit your Autoexec macro (Tools / Macro / Autoexec / Create or Edit) and add the simple one line command somewhere after the Sub MAIN line:
AppMaximize 1
Click File, then Close. And Yes you want to save changes. This forces Word to start maximized when it loads. If a hidden copy of WordMail is lurking around when you start Word 95, Word won't run its AutoExec macro and will be displayed at less-than-full-screen size.
If you get Word at less than full screen you should then do whatever it takes - Ctrl+Alt+Del, re-starting and closing Exchange, even re-booting your computer - to get rid of that lousy hidden copy before you try to get any real work out of Word.
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