Someone on the Office team has a sense of humor

Microsoft Office 1 Minute

I’ve been poking around in the Windows registry (don’t try this at home), looking at the keys that hold various settings for the Office 2007 beta. Now, I’m used to seeing globally unique identifiers, or GUIDs, used throughout the registry. In Windows, these consist of 32 characters, broken up into one group of 8 characters, followed by three groups of 4 characters, and a final group of 12 characters, surrounded by curly braces, and separated by hyphens. Like so:

{3F2504E0-4F89-11D3-9A0C-0305E82C3301}

The point of GUIDs is that they’re supposed to be pseudo-random, thus virtually eliminating the possibility that two software components will use the name number to define themselves.

So, look at these GUIDs that appear under the current user’s key for the current beta of Office 2007:

Office_registry

Not exactly random, is it? In fact, the six characters at the end of each GUID are practically L33t5p34k.

Although I can’t prove it, I suspect that the reason these settings are expressed as GUIDs is for obfuscation, to keep people like you and me from looking at them and possibly tweaking their settings to change the look, feel, and behavior of Office.

Anyone know what those keys are really for?

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Published by Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

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9 thoughts on “Someone on the Office team has a sense of humor”

  1. I don’t have Office 12, but 0409 is the locale code for US English. What information is in a subkey?

    GUIDs don’t really obfuscate things that much, no matter what the name of the key it’s pretty easy to fire up RegMon and see what keys are touched as you make changes to the UI.

  2. On a clean install, there’s nothing in the subkeys at all. On a well-used beta, there appear to be subkeys on two of the six keys, the first and the last (ie, the non-0409 keys).

    There’s a fair amount of obscure settings stuff in each one. Integration with other MS products and security settings in the first key, UI stuff in the last key.

  3. There have always been non-random style GUID’s in the registry. You see them a lot in programming when you go to impliment one of the shell interfaces and suddenly the GUID’s you are dealing with are very… regular looking.

    I always assumed this was just so they could keep their own interfaces grouped together for easy access.

  4. You’re right, Shawn. I’ve seen those non-random GUIDs too. But this is the first time I’ve seen someone actually spell a word in leetspeak within a GUID!

  5. “I suspect that the reason these settings are expressed as GUIDs is for obfuscation, to keep people like you and me from looking at them and possibly tweaking their settings[…]”

    Well, how nice of them :-P. Bring back the .ini’s please.

  7. No, this definitely isn’t an Easter egg. An Easter egg is a feature or display that’s hidden in code and only accessible through a secret set of commands or keystrokes. They’ve been banned for security reasons.

    This little bit of whimsy is available for anyone to see in the registry. It doesn’t violate any rules, either. It’s just odd.

  8. The real reason is actually probably quite a bit less intriguing. Since Office 2007 is still in Beta, setting one part of the GUID to be the same string would make it easy for a developer testing / making changes to Find Next through all relevant keys.

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