Doug's Mailbag: Office 2007 Glitch Fixes, More

Doug mentioned last week that he'd been having some issues recently with both IE 8 and Office 2007. Here are some of your tips for the Office problem (and check back on Wednesday for your IE 8 responses):

This happened to one user here (out of fifty) -- highlight anything in Word 2007 on XP Pro and the whole document gets highlighted. Two restarts fixed it.
-Michael

I had the same thing in my Office 2003 for months. To resolve it, I deleted the Normal.dot and let it create a new one and life was good again (after months of frustration). Might do the same for 2007 and see if that fixes it for you.
-Phillip

The issue with Word is not so much a glitch as it is a newer option/feature (since Word 2003). Word tries to determine if you want the matching text style to include the similar formatting, so the whole block will change. There is an option to disable this feature.

As for our own software, we will not change the behavior of the software unless the user selects this new feature as an option. Kind of like the Prime Directive from "Star Trek." I wish Microsoft took this stance!
-Tom

If you have text that uses a particular style (Normal, for instance) and that style has the "Automatically update" setting checked, then if you change the style of a single piece of text that uses that style (for example, by making it bold), all the other text in the document that uses that style will also automatically become bold. To fix it, clear the "Automatically update" check box.
-Marcus

Have you been cleaning your computer? CCleaner does a good job. With all the spam you say you receive, I am not surprised with your problems.
-Pedro

Here is another issue, at least on the version of Office 2007 in my classroom: Adding a text box into a document causes the Blue Screen of Death. Anyone else experiencing this?
-Mitch

Meanwhile, this reader takes issue with Office 2007 in general:

I bought the latest Office about a year ago and still hate it. The thing I was surprised about was the goofy new interface which I thought was kind of childish and geared toward teenagers. The ribbon was not intuitive at all, and I could not find anything. I'm going, "So where is New? Where is Save, for chrissake? Where is Save As? Where is the formatting?" Finally, I realized you have to ADD these basic items to your toolbar yourself. What? I would have rather had to REMOVE these things from the tools scattered across the top of the window.

The point is, you should not have learn Word from scratch to use 2007. Sure, it looks groovy, but is it better? Some new features to me are useless. I could be wrong, but I'm sure most people just want to type a letter or create a spreadsheet, not spend a lot of time trying to figure out the program. (Or is it an app? Who cares?) So now I only use it to open Word 2007 .DOCX files, then I go back to Word 2003 to actually get some work done. Another peeve I have is that I can't put it on my older XP machine because I don't have the lastest security pack for it. I want to know why it is any of Microsoft's business what kind of security I have on my computers. That should be my concern, and it should not prevent me from installing a glorified word processing program that I purchased.
-Anonymous

Doug thinks that for Linux to really make inroads against Microsoft, it needs to work on its desktop presence. Marc agrees:

You're right, Linux vendors just don't care all that much about the desktop. The problem with Linux on the desktop is that it is constantly touting itself as being "just as good as Windows." If Linux wants to compete on the desktop, it has to make it easy for the consumer to buy Linux (pre-installed) on the desktop and it needs to show the consumer why they should choose Linux over Windows. The price differential between Windows and Linux on identical hardware is just too small to attract the non geek consumer.
-Marc

Finally, Doug rated one pundit's notion that Windows 7's success will hurt Microsoft as a 10 "on the dope scale," but Benjamin thinks it's fairly tame:

The news is littered with dopey theories (think global warming) or has suppressed the really stupid ones (like eugenics, which was a BIG one that got buried but was incredibly and ridiculously mainstream with massive support from everyone).

So on the scale of comparison, to say that Microsoft being successful with the Vista-service-pack-called-a-new-name will blind it from focusing on forward-moving areas isn't all that crazy -- more like a 2 on the scale.
-Benjamin

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on 11/16/2009 at 1:17 PM