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An In-depth Look at PRIME 97 for Word 97 - Clear History Lists

Clear History Lists was developed by cracker-jack Office developer Mike Craven. The idea is to sweep up and clear out the various file strings that Microsoft Word remembers for a variety of its built-in dialogs (17, to be exact), and then some. For example, select File / Open and click the drop-down arrow of the "File name" control. Mine has several entries. Inside the control, each is a separate item like this:

test
P8
family
http://www.primeconsulting.com/software/dealer.html

and so on. When I click on Mike's Clear History Lists tool, it pops up with a list of all my dialogs that have non-empty history lists, in this case the one I'm interested in clearing is "Clear Word's Open Dialog Box History List." I select it, then re-check File / Open and its "File name" control list is pure as the driven snow. Clear History Lists does the same scrub work for Word's Most Recently Used (MRU) file list on the File menu.

There's a group of commands that relate to using IE (or Word itself) to explore the Internet and your Windows Start menu.

• Clear Internet Explorer's URL History List -- clears the list of sites that appears in IE's Address control and also in Word's Web toolbar's Address control

• Clear Start Menu's Run Program History List -- clears the list of entries you've typed into the Start / Run dialog

• Clear Start Menu's Recent Documents History List -- clears the list of documents stored in Start / Documents

• Clear Start Menu's Find Files or Folders History List -- clears the list of files or folders you've typed into the Start / Find / Files or Folders dialog (the same dialog you see in Windows Explorer if you choose Tools / Find / Files or Folders)

Mike sagely included a "Clear ALL History Lists!" option for the hopelessly fastidious (like us) that clears all of the history lists shown on the popup.

As an added bonus, from your Edit menu select PRIME Clear Undo List to clear Word's undo history list. (This feature is not on the Clear History Lists popup menu.)

Clear History Lists is just one of dozens of productivity- enhancement utilities in PRIME 97 for Word 97, selected as one of the Top Ten Office Add-Ins by the prestigious PC World magazine.

Check out a free 30-day trial version at:
http://www.PRIMEConsulting.com/software/p97wd.html

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