N
Norman R. Nager, Ph.D.
I submitted the following to www.MacOSXHints.com and it appeared among the
Dec. 28 "Hints":
I wish to offer a specific hint that I created for Microsoft Office
preferences and tailored to preferences for other applications. When Word,
Excel or Entourage gets corrupted and nothing else seems to work, trashing a
number of preferences for the application plus some for Office, itself, may
solve the problem. But it's hard to remember when reconstructing the several
pages of preferences for each Office application which boxes you had checked
and what choices you had made in selecting other prefs. To spare myself the
extra time (and errors) of pondering over each choice, I did the following:
Opened each preference and took a screen shot.
Created an Entourage Note for each Office 2004 application (For those who do
not use Entourage, any software for saving and retrieving notes, such as
iData 2, will do.)
While looking at a given screenshot, typed in and boldfaced the name so I
could easily spot it
Entered relevant info on choices made (I did not bother with unchecked
boxes, for example).
You could stop with just making screenshots and saving them in a folder. But
because I change preferences from time to time, I decided to invest the
extra time in creating the Entourage Notes rather than making a new
screenshot each time. It's also faster for me to access the note by
searching for a combination of "Word" and "Preference" in Entourage Notes.
Should Entourage itself be corrupted, I copied the note on Entourage
preferences into iData 2, where I can do an even faster search with less
steps.
I started with Office 2004 because of the hundreds of preferences it
involves. But the same system works well for other programs in which one has
done more than select default preferences.
Respectfully, Norm
Dec. 28 "Hints":
I wish to offer a specific hint that I created for Microsoft Office
preferences and tailored to preferences for other applications. When Word,
Excel or Entourage gets corrupted and nothing else seems to work, trashing a
number of preferences for the application plus some for Office, itself, may
solve the problem. But it's hard to remember when reconstructing the several
pages of preferences for each Office application which boxes you had checked
and what choices you had made in selecting other prefs. To spare myself the
extra time (and errors) of pondering over each choice, I did the following:
Opened each preference and took a screen shot.
Created an Entourage Note for each Office 2004 application (For those who do
not use Entourage, any software for saving and retrieving notes, such as
iData 2, will do.)
While looking at a given screenshot, typed in and boldfaced the name so I
could easily spot it
Entered relevant info on choices made (I did not bother with unchecked
boxes, for example).
You could stop with just making screenshots and saving them in a folder. But
because I change preferences from time to time, I decided to invest the
extra time in creating the Entourage Notes rather than making a new
screenshot each time. It's also faster for me to access the note by
searching for a combination of "Word" and "Preference" in Entourage Notes.
Should Entourage itself be corrupted, I copied the note on Entourage
preferences into iData 2, where I can do an even faster search with less
steps.
I started with Office 2004 because of the hundreds of preferences it
involves. But the same system works well for other programs in which one has
done more than select default preferences.
Respectfully, Norm