Bend Word To Your Will disappears from the Dock

[Julia]

I have been reading this and other newsgroups since I got my new iBook
G4 in October, and I have picked up some wonderful tips and help for
maximizing my use of Office 2004. One of the best was finding "Bend Word
to Your Will" by Clive, which has proven so useful that I put an alias
of it in the Dock so I could quickly access it for reference.

Now a weird thing is happening -- the last couple of times that I have
restarted my iBook, the icon for "Bend Word" has turned into a ghostly ?
(question mark), and the document title above it has lost its extension
(it just reads "Bend_Word_to_your_will" rather than
"Bend_Word_to_your_will.doc"). The icon, of course, doesn't work for
launching the document, forcing me to trash it and drag another one into
the Dock.

Any ideas on what might be happening? I have some other docs in the
alias -- an Excel file and a PDF file, to be precise -- and neither of
those seem to lose their connections to the original file.

Regards,
Julia

 

[Michel Bintener]

A Dock icon with a question mark normally indicates that the Finder has lost
the connection to the file the icon links to, e.g. when you've deleted the
original file. I'm not sure why this is happening, so I'd only recommend
going through the traditional Mac OS X standard troubleshooting, which
includes making sure you're running the latest updates (10.2.8, 10.3.9 and
10.4.4, respectively) and repairing your disk privileges with Disk Utility.

Apart from that, does the same thing happen when you place the original
document into the Dock, as opposed to an alias? Technically speaking,
there's no need to create an alias to add to the Dock, a Dock icon
automatically acts as an alias (sort of).

Michel

 

[Julia]

I am running 10.4.4. I will try the other troubleshooting steps and see
if there's any improvement. I actually don't restart my iBook very
often, usually just putting it to sleep overnight, so the problem
doesn't crop up very often.

As to your second point, I think I misspoke originally -- what I do is
drag the document icon from a Finder window down to the Dock, where it
replicates itself. I don't make an alias first and then put that in the
Dock. I got a bit fast and loose with my terminology, being a newly
returned Mac user from the pre-Dock era (the last Mac OS I used was 7.6,
I think, on my Powerbook 1400cs).

Thanks for the reply and suggestions,
Julia

 

[Julia]

Perhaps no one has told you they have "Dock"ed "Bend Word" but I can't
be the only one (and I DO have the new version, thanks very much for
it). As you point out in your introduction, it's meant as a reference,
and it's handy to dip into when it's in the Dock. It's right there next
to the Excel spreadsheet where I'm tracking my cable modem's frequent
outages -- all in all, I prefer your creation to mine.

Your suggestion about putting it in the sidebar is interesting. I don't
think I realized that items could be added there other than the default
ones. (I did say I'm new to OSX, right?) I'll have to consider that,
though I would still have to clear the screen of its myriad windows to
open a Finder window, and it still seems easier to dip into the Dock --
unless of course there's some snappy keystroke shortcut I don't know
about to pull up a finder window without switching out of the active
application.

Cheers,
Julia