[FAQ] (Annoyances, Office 97) The 10 Most Important Things You Need to Know About Office 97

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We wrote this FAQ to answer the many questions we receive on this topic from our clients and other inquiring minds in the many electronic communities we frequent.

This FAQ is taken from Office 97 Annoyances (by Woody Leonhard, Lee Hudspeth, and T.J. Lee; ISBN 1-56592-310-3; O'Reilly and Associates). For additional information on this title, visit our site's page http://www.primeconsulting.com/annoyances.

Click here to order Office 97 Annoyances from Amazon.

(Annoyances, Office 97) The 10 Most Important Things You Need to Know About Office 97

Q: What do you gentlemen say are the ten most important things I need to know about Office 97?

A: That's a good one. Here goes. (For additional details on any of these topics, see Office 97 Annoyances, Excel 97 Annoyances, and Word 97 Annoyances.)

1. Get the Office 97 "Enterprise Update Service Release 1" (SR-1) by calling Microsoft at 800-370-9272.

Insist that you want the "Enterprise Update Service Release 1" on CD-ROM. Otherwise they'll send you a partial patch CD. The SR-1 should be sent to you free. (If you got Office 97 in a bundle deal when you bought your PC, you'll have to call the manufacturer and beg for the Office 97 "Enterprise Update Service Release 1" CD. Chances are good the first person you talk to won't know what you're talking about. You can download a stunted SR-1 patch from www.microsoft.com, but you really should push to get the full update.)

2. If you create spreadsheets with more than 17 columns, you must get the Excel 97 recalculation bug patch.

Download it from www.microsoft.com/OfficeFreeStuff/Excel/dlpages/XL8P1.htm and install it immediately.

3. Subscribe to WOW, the FREE weekly electronic newsletter.

Called "Woody's Office Watch" this is one of your best sources for up to date Office information. Subcribe at Woody's Office Watch (WOW).

4. Use the new Office Assistant to learn more.

Office Assistant is a smart "agent" that floats on your screen and allows you type in natural, even complex, English questions like "what's new in Word?" to get help on a topic. Additionally, when the Assistant (known in these parts as OfficeBob) pops up a bright yellow light bulb, new -- and experienced -- users alike can click on the bulb to see if the Assistant has a more efficient way of doing what you just did. The nice thing about the Office Assistant is, you can turn it on and off with a single click.

5. Customize the settings that control what Office knows about you and your work preferences (we call 'em the "Tools Options" settings).

There's more to these than can be explained in one or even several sentences, and the various Annoyances series books explain them all in detail 'natch, but working one's way through these settings and tweaking them just right will pay off in untold saved time over the course of a year. Do this for each one of your Office applications, by the way.

6. Customize your Office Shortcut Bar toolbars.

This is what used to be known as MOM (Microsoft Office Manager). It's an UberToolbar that sits wherever you put it on your Windows desktop. Sort of like a Task Bar for Office. You can fire up Office applications, individual Office files, non-Office files, non-Office applications, you name it.

7. Customize your individual Office application toolbars.

You'll usually want to completely rebuild your Standard and Formatting toolbars. These come from the factory in a goofy "demoware" mode (another coined term in the Annoyances series) that goes over well when Microsoft's marketing minions are pounding the floors at Comdex, but have absolutely no benefit to the average user out in the trenches. It's easy once you know how, as explained in each of the books. And, it's easy to do it so you can reset to the default settings without losing your own customizations.

8. Turn off the quirky FastFind.

Turn it off, and also remove it from your Startup folder so it doesn't suck up system resources.

9. Get and use a good anti-virus software package.

Doesn't matter which one you use (Norton, McAfee, IBM, etc.) so long as it has frequent updates via the manufacturer's Web site, and of course make sure it handles Office 97 documents since macro viruses for same are propagating like rabbits.

10. Turn on Office Sounds.

If you've got a sound card and speakers but you don't have Office Sounds installed, you're missing some amazingly subtle but powerful audio cues about your Office activities.

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