Author: Ed Bott

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

Tip of the day: Recover gracefully when an Office program crashes

If an Office XP or Office 2003 program (such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) stops responding to input, don’t panic. And don’t kill its entry in the Windows Task List. If you do that, you’ll lose any unsaved work. Instead, take a deep breath and use a well-hidden tool that even most experienced Office users don’t know about: the Application Recovery console.

Leave the stalled program running, click Start, and open the All Programs menu. Click Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, and finally Microsoft Office Application Recovery. This opens the Application Recovery console, which shows you all Office programs that are currently running.

App_recovery
[Click picture to see larger image]

For Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other programs that you use to create and save individual documents, you’ll see the Recover Application button. When you click this button, you force the program to fail; the built-in recovery tools save any currently open files and then close the hung program, giving you the option to report the error to Microsoft. For programs such as OneNote and Outlook, which save data on the fly, this button isn’t available and you’re given the Restart Application option instead.

This feature can take most of the sting out of a sudden crash, especially when you use it in conjunction with the AutoRecover features in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. AutoRecover saves a backup copy of your current document, worksheet, or presentation at intervals you specify (the default is every 10 minutes). To set AutoRecover options for one of these three programs, click Tools, Options and find its checkbox on the Save tab.

Dave Matthews, Inc.

I’m a big fan of the Dave Matthews Band, especially the sense of community that I feel at a show by the band. There’s a lot of the feeling that the Grateful Dead had in their heyday.

So I was surprised, to put it mildly, to learn that the latest DMB album, Stand Up, incorporates digital rights management that makes it difficult to rip into digital format for playback on a PC or portable music player. This is apparently an especially big problem for anyone using an iPod with Windows. Judging by what I’ve read on the band’s site, it’s no problem to rip to a Mac using iTunes, and it’s no problem to rip to a PC using secure WMA format. But the process for getting tracks into iTunes on a PC means ripping them into secure WMA first, then burning a CD, and then ripping the burned CD using iTunes.

This is, to put it mildly, bullshit. The band trusts its fans enough to allow them to tape live shows and exchange the tapes for free. It makes a fortune off its live performances. Most of the taping community enthusiastically supports the band by buying its “official” live releases and studio CDs. And most importantly, this form of DRM simply doesn’t work. All it does is turn off the band’s most loyal fans. I won’t allow DRM-protected tracks on my PC.

Microsoft isn’t the only corporation in bed with this band. AOL Music did an exclusive webcast of the live DMB show from New York City’s Roseland Ballroom earlier this month. I had no problem playing it back in Internet Explorer (after installing an AOL ActiveX control), but Firefox refused to play the archived show even after I installed the required plug-in.

I won’t be buying this CD. And observant readers will notice that I didn’t link to the CD’s Amazon.com listing, which means I won’t be selling it, either. Dave, you need some new technical advisors.

The history of the Batmobile

Ah, jet lag! I’m awake a few hours earlier than normal (and normal is already pretty early for me). I’m caught up with e-mail, too, which allows me to be tempted by Web sites like this lavishly illustrated History of the Batmobile. It has an interactive timeline that goes from 1941 to the present day. I didn’t know, for instance, that the bubble top first appeared in the year I was born, 1955.

1955-batmobile

It’s an extra-special bit of synchronicity given that I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which is devoted to the golden age of American comics, on the (long) flight back yesterday. (If you missed this Pulitzer Prize winner when it came out a few years back, put it on your list for this summer. Author Michael Chabon pulls off that rare combination of unfailingly accurate pop culture references and genuinely high literature. Big themes, fun to read.)

Something (my agent and a couple of impatient publishers, for starters) tells me I’ll have a few, um, slightly higher priorities this week. But if you’ve got some spare minutes, this is probably worth a look.

(Via Tariq.)

Tip of the day: Disable Word’s annoying Overtype key

This week’s tips are exclusively for Microsoft Office users.

Sooner or later, everyone who uses Microsoft Word discovers that they’ve mysteriously shifted into a new editing mode, where positioning the insertion point in an existing block of text and then typing a few characters causes the new text to erase the existing text. The problem? You accidentally hit the Insert key, which caused Word to switch into Overtype mode instead of the default Insert mode (where newly typed text is added to existing text).

The fix is to redefine the Insert key so that it doesn’t toggle between Insert and Overtype mode. Click Tools, Customize and then click the Keyboard button to open the Customize Keyboard dialog box shown here.

Word_overtype

From the Categories list on the left, choose All Commands. From the Commands list on the right, choose Overtype. In the Current Keys box, you’ll see that the Insert key is defined as the Overtype toggle. Select that value and then click Remove.

Click Close to save your changes, and you won’t be bothered by this annoyance on that computer again. Expert Word users will note that the change is saved in the Normal document template (Normal.dot). If you copy this file to another computer, replacing the existing Normal document template, this customization applies to all documents on the new computer as well.

Tip of the day: Bookmark your favorite Registry locations

If you expect to be a Windows power user, you must muck about in the registry. (Mere mortals, of course, should avoid the Registry Editor like the plague. Seriously. One slip in the Registry Editor and you can render your system unbootable or worse.)

For experienced Windows users, part of the annoyance of using the Registry Editor is having to expand each branch to find the exact key and value you’re looking for. It’s especially tedious when you keep coming back to the same key while you experiment with a new setting or troubleshoot a problem.

The solution is to use a well-hidden Regedit feature that lets you bookmark a particular location. After highlighting a key in the tree pane on the left side of the Regedit window, click Favorites, Add to Favorites. Change the default name to a descriptive label and click OK. Your saved entries appear on the Regedit Favorites menu, sorted in the order in which you created them. To remove a favorite, click Favorites, Remove Favorite(s). Click one or more entries in the list (hold down the Ctrl key as you click to select multiple items) and click OK to remove those items.

Tip of the day: Shut down, stand by, or hibernate without a mouse

What do you do if your mouse stops responding? How do you close all open programs and restart Windows without losing any data? The secret is to know these keyboard shortcuts, which bypass the mouse. They also come in handy if you have a notebook computer and want a fast way to stand by or hibernate without having to mess with touchpads or other pointing devices.

Continue reading “Tip of the day: Shut down, stand by, or hibernate without a mouse” →

Tip of the day: Get details about a program

Trying to figure out what a program file does can be a challenge. That’s especially true when the file in question is one of many EXE and DLL files in a folder. When in doubt, right-click and choose Properties. For Windows program files and DLLs, the resulting dialog box contains a Version tab that includes all sorts of valuable information about the program, including the current version number and the developer’s name.

I use this technique all the time. Recently, for instance, I found that a file called Reader_sl.exe was loading automatically at startup. What is this file? A quick search revealed that it was in the Program Files folder, deeply nested in the Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader folder. When I inspected its properties, I found this information:

File_props

On my notebook computer, speed is at a premium, and I rarely read Acrobat files. Armed with this information, I looked in the Common Startup folder (%allusersprofile%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup) and deleted the SpeedLauncher shortcut. These details can also come in handy if you’re considering an upgrade to an installed program but aren’t sure exactly which version you currently have installed.

Tip of the day: Get faster access to common Control Panel options

Some of the most useful Control Panel options have shortcuts that are readily accessible from the desktop or the Start menu, although you’d never know it by looking:

  • Display – To open this dialog box and change any Display options, including screen saver settings and resolution, right-click any empty space on the desktop and choose Properties.
  • System – Right-click the My Computer icon (on the desktop or on the Windows XP Start menu) and click Properties. This gives you quick access to Device Manager and other system tools. (Click Manage to open the Computer Management console.)
  • Network – Right-click the My Network Places shortcut (on the desktop or on the Windows XP Start menu) and choose Properties. This allows you to manage your current network connections.
  • User Accounts – Click the icon to the left of your user name at the top of the Start menu. Then click Back to adjust any settings for your account, or Home to select another user account.
  • Internet Options – Right-click the browser icon at the top of the Start menu and click Internet Properties.
  • Date and Time – Right-click the clock at the far right side of the taskbar and click Adjust Date/Time.
  • Taskbar and Start Menu – Right-click the Start button and then click Properties.

In Windows XP Inside Out, Second Edition (and the expanded Deluxe Edition), we document the command-line syntax to open just about any Control Panel option, including some of the esoteric switches that let you specify which tab of a specific dialog box should have the focus. If you write scripts or batch files and you want this level of control, you’ll want the book.