Why you should send those error reports to Microsoft

When a Windows program crashes, Windows XP gives you the opportunity to send an error report to Microsoft. The process is called Online Crash Analysis. My advice: Do it. Here’s a perfect example of why it’s good for you and for your fellow PC users.

For years, I’ve encountered a sporadic problem with Word. The conditions that lead to the error are easy to identify, although I’ve never been able to reliably reproduce it. Basically, if I cut large blocks of text from a specific type of document (something I do fairly often when writing a book), I run a serious risk that Word will crash with an error message that points to “stamp 424d964d.” I’ve Googled the error and found that other people have it too. But I’ve never found an answer, and I’ve learned to be extra careful when doing mass cut-and-paste jobs. (The good news is that Word always recovers my documents perfectly, and I don’t lose any data – only some time as I reopen and repair each one.)

Today I encountered this error several times, and on the last time I decided to send in an error report. I’ve done this a hundred times or more before, but this time the response I got was different. After the error report finished sending, I was greeted with this Web page:

[Click image to see a larger view.]

Some engineer, using the great big bucket of error reports sent in from all sorts of people all over the world, found the problem, which turns out to be a bug in Word 2003. A fix is in the works. When the fix is ready, the Online Crash Analysis page will offer to install it for me when I bump into this error and send in a report. Imagine that!

Update: Turns out others have been talking about this lately as well. Read this, and this, and this, for instance (thanks, Nicholas). And this informative post from Chris Pratley (thanks, Zaine).

Will anyone really care about XML support in Office 12?

In the comments to my earlier post, Jim Minatel greets the XML announcement with appropriate skepticism. I thought the comments were worth promoting to the main page:

I’ve been burned so many times by the “this Office version is going to do XML right/better” mantra. In fact, I’m sure that back in 1998 when we started drafting proposals and outlines for “Special Edition Using Office 2000,” XML was one of the new features then that was going to turn Office on its head. Kughen, you reading this, am I right?

Fast forward to 2002, I’m at Wiley instead of Que, 2 office versions later (skipping over XP to 2003) and I was hearing “XML is really done right in Office this time. yeah, we know no one uses it in XP but they will in 2003.” We’re not the only publisher who has Office 2003 & XML books that are at the bottom of our overall sales charts.

I wouldn’t bet against Scoble but I doubt there will be much that will convince publishers or bookstores to publish or stock Office “12” XML books. Coverage within your general Special Edition Using Office book this time makes sense though.

By way of background, Jim and I used to work together when I wrote Windows books for Que; Rick Kughen has been my editor at Que for many years. Book editors have some of the most finely tuned BS detectors around. They have to, or they wind up with warehouses full of unsold books.

Jim’s absolutely right. I remember reading breathless white papers like Manage Information with XML in Office Professional Edition 2003 (published on Microsoft’s Web site in May 2003), which basically consisted of a lot of hand-waving and vague statements about the brave new world of XML. Of course, when we asked for concrete examples of how real people could incorporate XML-based Office documents into real documents in their real working environment every day, we were met with stony silence. Basically, in Office 2003, XML was a “checklist item,” and (except for some very wonky InfoPath applications) virtually no one used it. Now that a new version of Office is in the pipeline, Microsoft’s spokespeople are acknowledging that the previous XML support was, shall we say, weak. That argument would be a lot stronger if they had acknowledged it back when Office 2003 came out.

One big development in Microsoft’s favor this time around is that there are many, many more ways to consume and reuse XML these days, starting with about 10 million blogs that didn’t exist in early 2003. Internal applications are much more likely to support XML import. Browsers like Firefox and Maxthon (and presumably IE7 Real Soon Now) offer native support for XML. If the Office development team builds hooks to Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Flickr, and (oh yeah) MSN Spaces, they could (just to pick some arbitrary examples) turn Word into a blog authoring tool, PowerPoint into a photo sharing tool, and Excel into an online list-management tool. If all we get are a slightly easier InfoPath and tight links to SharePoint, we’ll know that this XML thing wasn’t such a big deal after all.

The devil is always in the details, and the real test of XML support in Office 12 will be whether real people can quickly and easily incorporate XML-based data into documents. We should know fairly early in the beta whether this is true, or whether we’re dealing with another round of hand-waving.

Show me, Microsoft.

Update: John Walkenbach has some interesting details from an Excel author/developer’s point of view.

OK, maybe it IS a big deal after all…

I’ve been reading up on the new Office 12 formats, which will be based on XML. Hmmm. Way smaller than existing binary formats. Distributed in Zip format. Easier to recover data from a corrupted or damaged file. Open. Easy (well, easier) to repurpose content.

OK, Scoble, maybe you’re right and this is a big deal after all.

Office 2003 has XML formats, but we barely mention them in Special Edition Using Microsoft Office 2003, because (as Brian Jones acknowledges in the Channel 9 video), they were pretty crude and essentially useless. I don’t know of anyone who’s seriously using XML in Office 2003, and anyone who is probably deserves a medal. This approach looks like the Office team is finally taking XML seriously.

So, when does the beta start? And is the Office team going to give technical beta testers enough time and input to really work out the kinks in these new formats and the rest of Office 12? In the past two beta cycles, the Office team has done a miserable job of communicating with beta testers, in my opinion. I hope this changes.

Update: Microsoft’s press release is here.

Office 12 to go all-XML, all the time

Once again, Mary Jo Foley scoops everyone with a two-hour head start on Microsoft’s big Office announcement:

Microsoft continues to slowly trickle out bits of information about its Office 12 suite. On Thursday the company will announce that it plans to make XML-based file formats the default in the version of Office due to ship in the latter half of 2006.

Microsoft is introducing the new formats as part of Office 12, officials said, and will share more details about them at next week’s Tech Ed 2005 conference in Orlando, Fla.

The new Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats will be designated as .docx, .xlsx and .pptx , respectively. Microsoft is referring to the family of new formats as “Microsoft Office Open XML Formats.”

Interesting, but not world-shattering. I was holding my breath that the story was going to screw up the schedule for updating my Office book next year, but I can rest easier now.

Tip of the day: Disabling “personalized” Office menus

Office XP and Office 2003 share a feature that is supposed to reduce clutter but instead increases confusion. I’m referring, of course, to the dreaded personalized menus and toolbars feature.

Using default settings, Office menus and toolbars change dynamically as you use each program. If there isn’t enough room on the screen for all the buttons on a toolbar, the program hides some buttons, making sure to display those you’ve used most recently. In the case of menus, the idea is to reduce clutter by showing you only the choices you’re likely to use instead of overwhelming you with a long menu containing many choices. Here’s what it looks like:

Personal_menus

See the chevron – the double arrow at the bottom of the menu? That’s your clue that there are more choices available on this menu than you can see. Click the chevron and the full menu drops down.

In practice, personalized menus are confusing to novices and experts. Why do the choices on the menus keep disappearing? Where is the option that’s supposed to be on the current menu? I recommend you configure Office to show full menus all the time. The good news is that one setting applies to all Office programs, so the fix is quick and easy. Here’s what to do:

In any Office program, choose Tools, Customize.
Click the Options tab in the Customize dialog box and select the Always show full menus check box.
Click Close.

You’re done. (For a more complete discussion of the ins and outs of this feature and other aspects of the Office interface, pick up a copy of Special Edition Using Office 2003 or Special Edition Using Office XP and read Chapter 2, “Customizing the Office Interface.”)

What if you find yourself working at someone else’s computer, where you’re reluctant to tamper with their settings? Just double-click a top-level menu choice (File, Edit, and so on) when you use an Office program. This shortcut immediately opens the full menu, just as if you had clicked the chevron.

Tip of the day: Enter international currency symbols in Office

Money makes the world go around, so why is there only one currency symbol (the dollar sign) on a standard U.S. keyboard?

To enter an international currency symbol in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint (or in Outlook’s message editor), you’ll need to memorize its four-digit ANSI character code and enter that code using the numeric keypad. Here are the codes for some common symbols:

Symbol	Code
Euro ( € )	Alt+0128
Yen ( ¥ )	Alt+0165
Pound ( £ )	Alt+0163
Cent ( ¢ )	Alt+0162

To enter one of these symbols, first make sure that Num Lock is turned on. Then hold down the Alt key and enter the four-digit code using the numeric keypad. (If you use the numbers along the top of the keyboard, this won’t work.) When you release the Alt key, your symbol appears in the location you selected.

Want to see the codes for more symbols? From Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, choose Insert, Symbol. Select a symbol from the available list and look at the bottom of the dialog box to see its ANSI code.

(By the way, this technique works in any Windows program that supports ANSI characters. If you need to enter symbols in a non-Office program, try these codes and see if they work.)

Tip of the day: My three favorite Excel shortcuts

You don’t have to be an accountant to use Excel. It’s an ideal tool for managing any kind of data that falls into a neat rows-and-columns format, including everything from simple lists to complex budget reconciliations. These are my three favorite Excel shortcuts that most people don’t know about:

Quick formatting Press Ctrl+1 to open the Format Cells dialog box, where you can change the way Excel displays text or numbers in a single cell or a range of cells. Even if you normally never use keyboard shortcuts, you should learn this one, which is universal and can save you a startling number of mouse clicks.
Easy fractions Did you know you can enter a fraction in Excel? Normally, if you enter a numeric value that includes a forward slash, Excel converts it to a date or leaves it formatted as text. So, if you enter 3/8, Excel displays 8-Mar in the cell and stores the call’s value as the most recent occurrence of that date – in this case, 3/8/2005. If you enter 13/64, Excel just stores your entry as text, and you’re unable to use it in calculations. The secret for entering a fraction is to preface it with a zero. If you enter 0 3/8 in the cell, Excel drops the leading zero and displays the result in the cell as a fraction while storing its decimal equivalent, 0.375, as I’ve shown here.
$Excel_fraction$

If you enter a compound fraction that includes a whole number followed by a space and a fraction, Excel does the same. So 12 3/8 displays in the cell exactly as you enter it but becomes 12.375 in your worksheet. In either case, you can now use the entered value as part of any mathematical calculation.
Instant zoom Use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out of your worksheet. Hold down the Ctrl key and spin the wheel down to zoom out; spin the wheel up to zoom back in. This shortcut has the same effect as using the Zoom control on the Standard toolbar or on the View menu. You can shrink the worksheet to as small as 10% of its actual size (good for getting a bird’s-eye view of the structure of a very large sheet, but lousy for editing) or up to 400% of actual size.

If you like these tips, you’ll find more just like them in Special Edition Using Microsoft Office 2003 and Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP.

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.

[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.

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.

Which Windows e-mail program is best?

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Rob Pegoraro has a review of several e-mail programs that left me scratching my head. Let me see if I can give you the short version. Here’s the intro:

One of the two most widely used programs in this category, Microsoft’s Outlook Express, has not had a meaningful update since 1999, save security fixes for its appalling history of vulnerabilities. The other is Microsoft’s bloated, corporate-centric Outlook, normally sold only with its Office suite for $150 and up. These are not exactly programs that inspire love.

OK, there’s the landscape. Now, he says, “ This dormant market is finally waking up.” The contenders are Eudora and Thunderbird. Here’s what he reports:

“Trouble commences with a move from Outlook Express or Outlook.” Eudora mangles address books and settings. Thunderbird doesn’t copy any Outlook settings.
“ Eudora is terrific with POP but slow and clumsy with IMAP; Thunderbird’s near-peerless IMAP performance contrasts with POP support that omits a few options handy when checking one account from two computers.”
Thunderbird “can’t even check your spelling as you type.”
Eudora “ routinely locks up briefly while processing messages and too often crashes outright. The software is confusing to learn … Eudora’s interface – vast amounts of blank space and toolbar icons that appear to have been drawn with crayons – looks ugly.”
Both programs try to filter spam, but neither one nails more than half of it.
Eudora excels in keeping track of messages, Thunderbird has a “slick message-finding system.”
Neither program can compete with Outlook in one crucial way: their address books.

Bottom line: “Considering how Thunderbird has evolved so far, it looks like the e-mail program of the future. But until Thunderbird gains a real address book, I can’t blame users who conclude that Outlook, for all its defects, remains the e-mail program of the present.”

Eudora seems to be a complete straw man here. Why waste half the review on a program that’s ugly and routinely locks up? I would have liked to see a head-to-head comparison between Thunderbird and Outlook, but that wouldn’t have been fair. Outlook is a personal information manager; Thunderbird is a simple e-mail program. What does he mean that Outlook is “bloated”? Does it use too much memory? And as for its “corporate-centric” design, Rob seems to be stuck in 1998. I haven’t worked in a corporate office since 1993, and Outlook is an absolutely indispensable part of my working life. The same is true for my wife, who left corporate life the same time I did and does just about everything in Outlook.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Thunderbird and agree that it’s a worthy alternative to Outlook Express. But I think a lot of the criticism of Outlook, as typified by its quick dismissal in this review, is a legacy of bugs and bad design decisions that plagued earlier editions. Most of the big problems were solved with Outlook 2002 (Office XP). The changes in Outlook 2003 made this a phenomenal productivity suite that does a great job with calendars, contacts and e-mail. In my experience, the program is fast, easy to use, extraordinarily customizable, and rarely if ever crashes.

And Outlook “doesn’t inspire love”? I know a lot of people who don’t work for Microsoft (David Allen, Marc Orchant, Sue Mosher, and a few hundred others) who would disagree.

(Bonus tip for everyone having problems with Outlook 2003 and IMAP: Open the account settings dialog box for your IMAP server and click the More Settings button. On the Advanced tab, slide the Server Timeouts bar all the way to the left, so it’s set at 10 seconds. Previously, I had experienced the same hangs that other people reported,. No longer.)