Category Archives: Applications

Byebye to an Adobe cash cow

PDF Microsoft has announced the next version of Office will support PDF creation natively.

Obviously, Adobe has faced competition before from various PDF creation applications, including the DIY method using… what was it, some kind of printer driver to get Postscript, then ps2pdf to get it into PDF? And it’s not as if Adobe has been resting, not enhancing Acrobat with extra functionality.

But this is different: the prime reason people buy Acrobat is to create PDFs from Office documents. And so far the cheapie clone Acrobat products/methods haven’t won much market share, because people trust the name brand PDF creator. But this is Microsoft, and if there’s one thing Microsoft does well, it’s blowing away other companies’ sales.

The Adobe guys must have seen this coming when they opened up the format. Maybe that was a factor in diversifying by buying Macromedia. It’ll be interesting to see their response.

Disabling the Insert key

MS Office 2003: Customise keyboard I can’t tell you how much I hate Windows’ overtype mode. Accidentally tap the Insert key, and you suddenly find your typing overwriting old text. Who would use such a pointless thing?

And it’s doubly worse in products such as Word, where the only clue that you’re in this stupid mode is the almost-invisible ungreying of the letters “OVR” on the status bar.

Even worse in other apps: Excel has it, invisibly, only when you’re editing cells. Powerpoint doesn’t have it. Thankfully Ultraedit noticably changes the cursor when it’s invoked.

It’s there, but invisible, in Outlook. If you set Outlook to use Word for editing messages, it does it invisibly because the Word email window has no status bar, but if you have a Word window sitting in the background, you can see the OVR status light up on that!

At least it can be disabled in Word:

Tools -> Customize -> click Keyboard
In the Categories, choose All Commands
In the Commands list, scroll down and find Overtype
In the Current Keys box, the word “Insert” should appear. Click on this, then click the Remove button. Then close the dialog boxes, and you’re done.

Wouldn’t you know it, this setting isn’t global throughout Office. So the Insert key will still do stupid things in Excel and Outlook. (Using Word for writing Outlook messages will get around it, but that might be too big a price to pay.)

MS Office 2003 SP2

Microsoft have released Office 2003 Service Pack 2, which focusses on security updates.

The journal formerly known as Woody’s Office Watch are reporting problems already, and recommending people steer clear of it for a little while.

(The Office Watch web site could do with some work. They’ve written their archives page in such a way that sometimes the lines don’t wrap, but you have to scroll across to read them; and try clicking the “Contact the webmaster” link to point it out, and you get your email program popping up composing a mail to “watchit”… very bloody useful.)

How to embed a Word document in another Word document

How to embed a Word document (or other file) in another Word document

Sometimes it makes sense to embed one Microsoft Word document in another, rather than include a link to it, or paste the contents in. This is especially useful when sending multiple documents to people who can’t access your shared files. (Though only, of course, in environments where you can be sure everybody has Microsoft Word. If that’s not assured, you should be using something more universal, such as PDF.)

For some reason Word makes it quite tricky to do, its interface preferring to send you down the path of taking the contents of your second document and pasting them into the first.

The easiest way I’ve found:

Find your second file (the one to be embedded) in Windows Explorer. Copy it (Ctrl-C)
Go to the spot in the document you want to embed it in
On the menu: Edit, Paste special, paste as Word document (or as file), then turn on Display as icon. (Ignore the gibberish where it claims to be pasting as a bitmap picture.) (Note in the screen grab below how short filenames live on in WinXP/Word 2003, ten years after long filenames were introduced into Windows)
Click Change icon
Change the caption to something meaningful, as Word’s default behaviour is to give it the incredibly useless caption “Microsoft Word Document”
If you want you can change the icon, though unless you’re deliberately trying to confuse people, the default is probably fine.
OK, OK. It should be done. Test by double-clicking on the icon

Microsoft today started previewing the next version of Office. Ten bucks says it won’t make this process any easier than it is now.

Dialog box for embedding documents

Apple announces iPod Nano (and some other stuff)

iPod Nano Well, after much speculation, this morning (AU time) Apple announced a swag of new stuff, including:

the quite ludicrously tiny iPod Nano (I reckon I’d lose it)
the very expected Motorola ROKR mobile phone, the first to include iTunes (shame it’s a Motorola. I hate Motorolas.)
a shiny new version of the iTunes software, featuring parental controls (woo hoo, does this mean no more Lenny Kravitz’s What The F%$# are we saying for my kids?), syncing data with Outlook (at smeggin’ last), playlist and shuffle enhancements
some exclusive content to the iTunes store, which therefore means we CAN’T BUY IT IN AUSTRALIA (grumble)

Out to lunch

Windows XP Task manager You know what really bugs me about Windows and Office sometimes? Sometimes a process will just decided to grab all the CPU and go out to lunch for minutes at a time. I don’t know what it thinks it’s doing — re-indexing its data, re-compiling itself, contacting Mars, something like that. Whatever it is, it’s not paying much attention to what I want it to do.

Outlook just did it. I was in the middle of writing an email. Voom, out to lunch. I managed to save it and exit. And the process kept running till I killed it. WTF? And before you ask, yes, my antivirus and firewall are primed, up-to-date and running. Latest releases, latest service packs of everything. This stuff should be stable.

Annoying, that’s what I call it.

Annoying Outlook bug

I’m sure this bug has been around for years, possibly back as far as Outlook 98: When reading an email, Ctrl-R is the shortcut for Reply. When writing it, it’s a shortcut to right justify the current paragraph. Even when you’re writing a plain text format mail which has no right justify.

If it was using the same shortcut keys as Word, you could left align it with Ctrl-L, or centre it with Ctrl-E. But neither of these seem to work. Not that it matters greatly, since being plain text, it loses the alignment during transmission.

Patches for Win2K and WP

If you’ve been holding off patching your Windows 2000 boxes with the latest security updates, do it now, because the Zotob worm is spreading fast. Thankfully it only affects Win2K, and anybody who’s already patched with MS05-039 is already protected.

Also new this week is WordPress 1.5.2. I’ve used WP for a while now, but am now dabbling with it for a company site… it’s increasingly impressive, especially for CMS/Non-dated pages work.

PS: According to a report, car-maker General Motors Holden has lost A$6 million in car production due to the Zotob worm. Other major companies have also been hit.

Stopping WordPress spammers

The blog comment/trackback anti-spam refinement continues.

I’m testing the WP-Hashcash plugin, which inserts Javascript code to calculate an authorisation code into the comment. Since comment spammers don’t actually use the comment forms (at least I hope not; not until they start using people to enter the comments), this means only real comments get through. Well, real comments from people with Javascript running. If they don’t have Javascript running, they may be out of luck. Hopefully that applies to nobody these days, and I think this solution is less painful than a captcha-based one.

But trackback spam is still a problem. One available option is to block direct access to the WordPress trackback PHP, but this isn’t very effective, since most current trackback spammers however are clever enough to call the “real” URL.

A version of Auto shutoff comments modified to close trackbacks on posts older than 28 days, however, seems more effective. I don’t particularly want to shut comments off (especially since the above plugin effectively stops comment spam), but trackbacks are less compelling to keep open.

Together with previously discussed .htaccess entries to block big bandwidth thieves, this appears to be a fairly effective set of anti-blog spam measures. For now.

Free Quicken

In early-mid July, Quicken Australia was offering their EasyStart package for sale with a 100% cashback. $99 on the counter to Mr Shop Keeper Man, $99 back to you in the mail a few days later.

Why would they do this? To increase market share, and to get more punters using Quicken who may renew their products next financial year. (Remember, this is one of the mobs who try and sting you for a new version when the tax rates change.) But hey, it’s software for free! Go for it!!!

There’s a catch, of course. There always is, right? To get your money back you have to go to their web site and enter your Customer ID and PIN number. But even after I’d installed and registered the software, there is no Customer ID and PIN number shown on the Licence screen. And I’m not alone — Tony had the same experience.

Turns out you have to ring up (me emailing support got no response) and wait on hold to eventually talk to someone in customer service to get the vital details. And it has to be done and the form sent in by 9th August. Thankfully it only took about 5 minutes on hold (via the Customer Service option), and the operator gave me the numbers straight away. You’ll also need the codes on the CD sleeve and on the promotional sticker on the box.

If I were a more cynical person, I’d think they might have done it this way deliberately, to avoid having to send out too many cashbacks.

The software itself seems to be fairly good, easy to use, and should do nicely for my basic accounting requirements. Well, better than handcrafted Excel spreadsheets and constant bitching about Activity Statements, anyway.

Cleaning up HTML out of Office

I found a good guide to cleaning out the gunk that’s in Word’s HTML documents. For the smallest most efficient files it seems to conclude that the Textism Wordcleaner — free for files under 20Kb; for bigger files subscription options are available. This issue has been causing me some angst for some time, and one of these days I’m going to bash out a tool for this myself. (Don’t hold your breath.)

Looking for Quicktime Pro

I really don’t appreciate nag screens. Quicktime nags me to buy Quicktime Pro, but when I click the Why Go Pro button to let Apple put their case for handing over the readies, all they’ll tell me is that it’s available for Mac, when I’m using Windows.

I also like the bit where they ask me not to steal movies, or “in ten years, it will cost $50(2) to see a movie in the theater”, with (2) being a footnote saying “(2) Exaggerated estimate.” Oh, very helpful. Not much of an estimate then, if it’s exaggerated, surely.

Apple store So anyway I found the link to buy Quicktime Pro for Windows, even though version 7 is still in beta. It then asks me which country I’m in, and when I choose Australia, throws me onto an Australian Apple shop page, with no hint of where to find Quicktime to buy it. I eventually had to use a search box within the shop site to find it again.

Sigh.

(Not that I’m buying it at the moment, you understand. Just looking for ranting ammunition.)