Word on Much Ado About IT

Office 365 Autosave

Julian Knight — Tue, 08 May 2018 10:20:16 +0000

I am sure that whoever in Microsoft came up with the idea of an autosave flag, they thought it was a great idea. And indeed it is. **However**, when they made it default to _on_, they made a logistical nightmare for the majority of users. This post discusses why and what you could do about it.

With autosave on by default, every shared document that you open in Word, Excel or PowerPoint is subject to the whims of the Office client software. This means that it is all too easy to accidentally make a change that is then autosaved changing a shared document, throwing out version control processes, possibly approvals, etc. To say nothing of annoying other colleagues with random changes.

When the “feature” was introduced at the start of 2017, Microsoft gave no way to change the default from on to off. By the middle of the year, however, they introduced a set of registry settings.

Somewhat inevitably for a poorly thought through feature, they compounded the issues by making these registry flags permanently disable autosave instead of allowing a change to default to off. :sigh:

Well, for what it’s worth, here are the registry codes you need to permanently disable autosave in the three client applications:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Word]
"DontAutoSave"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Excel]
"DontAutoSave"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\PowerPoint]
"DontAutoSave"=dword:00000001

You can save the above code to a text file ending in .reg. Then right-click on the file in Windows File Explorer and chose the merge option to turn off autosave.

If you want to undo the change, set the values to 0 instead of 1.

Microsoft 64-bit Application Support (lack-of)

Julian Knight — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:08:44 +0000

Microsoft's 64-bit support is still sorely fragmented as we find out with a brand new laptop trying to access Microsoft SharePoint.

The joys of working with Microsoft products!

So I have a brand-new, shiny 17″ HP laptop. 64-bit throughout. 6GB of RAM and comes pre-installed with 64-bit Windows. You would think, then, that you would want to use 64-bit applications right? Wrong!!

I automatically use the 64-bit version of Internet Explorer to access some Microsoft specific sites (Outlook Web Access and SharePoint 2007). I install and use the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office. Does this work well with SharePoint (from Microsoft)? No!

For starters, you cannot upload an Excel spreadsheet to a SharePoint list like you should be able to. You get an error:

Next you try to switch a list into a “Datasheet” view – which looks a bit like a spreadsheet. Inevitably, you get another error:

To fix these errors, you then have to download and install “2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components“. And you have to use the 32-bit version of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9).

Low-cost Information Management, Communications and Collaberation Tools

Julian Knight — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 22:00:47 +0000

Although much of the work I do is for very large organisations and extremely costly projects, being an adopted Yorkshire-man, I’ve always an eye open for a bargain! More seriously, there are many small to medium sized businesses and charities that cannot afford big IT budgets but that still are crying out for good information management, communications and collaboration tools. In this article, I’ve tried to highlight a few tools that I think are worth looking at. I’ve not included anything in this article that requires a monthly or annual cost. All the tools here are available for free at least with limited features. The feature lists given are for the free versions with paid-for key features noted where appropriate. I also note if any of the web sites are blocked by typical enterprise firewalls. There is a lot more than what I’ve shared here, I’ll try to update this article from time-to-time.

Office Applications

Word processing, spreadsheets, presentations are the core of an office application suite. Additional tools might be included such as email, calendar, note taking, formula editing, diagrams, mind mapping.

SSuite Office Software I’ve not tried this free, Microsoft Windows only, office suite but it certainly looks interesting.
Microsoft Office I know that it may seem strange to include this in an article about low-cost solutions. However, you can get Microsoft Office at a very low price from a number of legitimate sources. These include enterprise licenses that allow home use and student licenses if you have a full-time student in the house. Cut-down versions of the MS Office suite are also often bundled with computer sales.
Google Docs This free offering from Google provides a reasonable choice for straight-forward documents but may be blocked from some enterprise sites. You get 1GB of free space and can pay for more if you need it.
Gliffy

Web-based diagramming like a simple version of Microsoft Visio. Free version is limited to 1 user, 5 diagrams and 2mb storage. Otherwise a monthly fee is required starting at US$5 per month.
Other options: Libre Office (forked version of OpenOffice, good enough for most people, not as good as MS Office), AbiWord, KOffice (Linux), iWork (Mac), …
Options not to bother with: Microsoft Live – far too simplistic, unreliable logins, poor sharing compared to Google (though you do get 25GB of free space).

Web Conferencing

Should provide instant messaging, voice, video, whiteboard (shared drawing space) and desktop sharing between computers as a minimum. May also provide meeting management tools, recordings of meetings and other facilities. Will generally be web applications that just require a web browser to access though plugins such as Adobe Flash may also be required and some may provide specific mobile tools.

AnyMeeting

Web-based. Free, advert supported. Up to 200 attendees, 6-way video conferencing. Polls and surveys, invitations, registration forms, optionally charge attendees. Flexible audio options: audio broadcast, conference call, VoIP (computer microphone & headset)
Vyew

Web-based, requires Adobe Flash. Free, advert supported. Up to 10 attendees. Forums, record activity, shared annotation of documents. Additional attendees and other features available on premium versions requiring monthly fees.
Other web-based alternatives: WebEx, GotoMeeting, GoToWebinar, Adobe Connect, Microsoft LiveMeeting.

Voice

Phone-to-phone voice calling.

ChatTime An iPhone app that uses local access numbers in many countries allowing international calls at low rates. Doesn’t require 3G or data access. Note that they still recommend using local SIM cards when roaming. International calls between 2 ChatTime users do not incur additional charges (both users have to call their local ChatTime access numbers).

Project and Task Planning

Tools that help teams and organisations plan complex tasks.

Asana

Team and project online task manager. Free for up to 30 members. Calendar sync, mobile web compatible, multiple workspaces (project categories), multiple projects, email in (new tasks by email), receive email updates, activity feed for each task, SSL connection, iPhone app
ReqMan

Totally free, unlimited users and projects. Project planning, time management & recording, requirements gathering, questionaires, reporting, WIKI, workflow, change requests, test cases, issues.
HappyToDos Online to-do and task management. Projects & tasks, estimate completion dates, estimate effort (hours), time reporting, team collaboration & file sharing.

Other Possibles

I’ve not yet looked at these but will do at some point

zeropc.com (blocked at enterprise site as possible malware)
https://podio.com/ (blocked at enterprise site as “Social Networking”)

Things to remember

When using web-based tools, remember that you may want more than connection security. Many tools claim to be “secure” by using SSL but that only secures the connection between you and them. Your data is unlikely to be stored encrypted on their servers and even when it is, it is even less likely that you can specify your own secure key so that server administrators at their end are prevented from accessing the data. In addition, remember that there are rarely enforceable service level contracts with web suppliers, if their systems fail, or they themselves fail; your data is history.

Microsoft Word Wildcard and Regular Expression Search and Replace

Julian Knight — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:20:05 +0000

One often missed aspect of the Find dialog in Microsoft Word is the ability to use wild cards. In fact, Word not only has the simple wild cards (* and ?) but uses simplified Regular Expression (REGEX) searching. In this article, I’ve put together a number of examples of advanced finds and replaces that I’ve found useful. I’ll update it from time to time.

Reference

[], groups (), repeats @, {}, anchors < > and exceptions ! ^p (to find a paragraph mark) does not work when using wildcard searches. Use ^13 instead. But you cannot use ^13 in the “replace with” field, it doesn’t work. Use ^2 to find a footnote mark Word wildcard searches are “lazy” (they stop at the smallest possible match not the largest as most regular expression tools would).

Examples

Don’t forget to turn on “Use Wildcards” to use these examples. It is in the “More” part of the find and replace dialogs.

Remove leading multiple spaces

If you have ever pasted from an email or text document, you may have come across the problem of some indented and manually wrapped text:

You can find the leading multiple spaces with the code (note that there is a leading space):

So selecting some text, putting this into the “find what” box and doing a “replace all” with nothing will remove all of the leading spaces in the selection. Actually it will remove everything that has at least 2 spaces followed by the start of a word.

Remove single paragraph marks to join lines

Search for: >^13 and replace with a single space. Note that you can combine this in a single step with the previous example as (note again leading space):

Though it should be noted that this can fail. For some reason if the last character on the line is a “/”, Word fails to find a match. Unexplained failures in Word’s find feature is not at all uncommon, it is rather buggy! To replace manual line breaks instead of a paragraph mark, use ^| instead of ^13. The special characters can be inserted from the “Special” button but do note the warning in “Reference” above and in “What you cannot do!” below regarding some of the marks you cannot find.

What you cannot do!

Recently, I needed to replace a load of text in a very large table (around 100 pages). I knew that the text to replace all appeared at the end of table cells but I couldn’t immediately work out how to search for this. My first thought was to do:

It turns out that you cannot search for this! Well, not outside of some VBA anyway. The character is actually an ASCII 07 so you should be able to do:

And using Replace to add to the text, you would have been able to use:

Which would have resulted in “Done in 1.4a but there is still more to do” wherever the original text appeared at the end of a cell. Sadly though, wildcard searches don’t find end-of-cell marker. Thankfully, there is another way that works for most searches.

Will find that text at the end of a cell. The leading * consumes all of the leading text in the cell forcing the search to occur at the end. Putting the * in brackets instead of the search text would allow the leading text to be retained in a replace. Putting both in separate brackets would allow the end text to be moved to the start of the cell with a replace string of: