IT Queries: Computer problems answered

I have the new version of Microsoft Office and people are telling me I can’t read what I send them.

Office 2007 has a range of new formats; Word 2007 saves documents in the docx format which is incompatible with the older doc formats.

The best solution when you are sharing files is to save files to the lowest level everyone can read. In Office 2007 you can set the file format by clicking the Office button (the big round button in the top left corner, click the Word Options button, click the Save tab.

Under Save Documents, click the drop-down arrow in the Save Files In This Format box and select Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc) the click OK.

Repeat this for Microsoft Excel.

One downside with this feature is that you will lose some Office 2007 features by saving to the 97-2003 format.

Office 2007 is going to become more common as will this problem. So we’d strongly recommend your friends and colleagues install the Office Compatibility Pack so they won’t get this problem in future.

I have lost all my clip art pictures on my computer. Is this a matter of deleting then re-installing Microsoft Office or is there a much easier way than this. Many thanks.

You don’t need to uninstall and reinstall, open the Control Panel and click Add/Remove Programs, or Programs in Windows Vista, and select Microsoft Office.

To right of the selection there are two buttons; change and remove. Click the Change button.

In the Microsoft Office setup screen select Add or Remove Features. Depending upon the version of Office you’ll either be presented with a list of features or a screen with tick boxes for each of the main components of Office.

If it’s the latter, click the choose advanced customization of applications and the features list will appear.

The clip art appears under the Office Shared Features heading. On some versions of Office the clip art itself appears under Clip Organizer. Click the Clip Organizer or Clip Art and select Run All From My Computer.

At this point you will need your Microsoft Office Disk. Insert it when prompted and install the clipart. You can also access clip art online from Microsoft as well as download clip art from third parties or buy it on disk.

Microsoft Word disappeared from computer & so no word files would open. Had Office 2000 premium installed but original disk packed in storage shed. Uninstalled premium and installed professional (loan from friend),although it says it has installed on hard drive it keeps asking for cd rom and even if I put the cd in I am told no program is responding.

What’s almost certainly happened is a Word add-in has caused this problem. The best thing to do is to start Microsoft Word in Safe Mode.

To do this, click Start then Run and type winword /a note there is a space before the /a. This will start Word without any macros or add-ins.

You may still be asked to insert the installation disk and you should do so to finish the process.

To disable add-ins, while in Word click the Tools menu, select Template and Addins. In the COM Add-Ins dialog box, the add-ins that are available (loaded) in Microsoft Word are listed.

To turn off a COM add-in, click to clear the COM Add-In check box, and then click OK. When you restart Microsoft Word, Word will start without loading the add-in.

Should the problem continue, you may have something autoloading with Word. Click Start, Run and type “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Startup”, you should include the quotation marks.  Move anything in this folder to another location.

We’d strongly urge you to find your own disks as you’re currently in breach of the Office license and could be accused of software piracy.

When you do find those disks, uninstall all versions of Office before reinstalling yours.

My MYOB accounting program is crashing when I try to export a document such as a pay advice in Microsoft Word. I’m running MYOB 17 and Office 2007 Ultimate edition.

The problem is Microsoft Groove, part of the Office 2007 Ultimate package. You’ll need to uninstall Groove for MYOB to work properly with Office applications.

In Windows XP click Start, Control Panel and Add/Remove Programs. In Vista click the Start button, Control Panel and Programs and Features.

Select Microsoft Office 2007  from the list of programs and choose Change and Add/Remove features, scroll down the list of features and change Groove to “Not Available”. Follow the wizard for the next steps. You may be asked to reboot at the end.

On rebooting, MYOB should be fine.

I work on a Mac computer.  In the program Microsoft Word, I have accidentally hit a key or combination of keys.  Now my computer is striking over currently typed letters instead of interjecting additional letters to the sentence.

What’s happened is you’ve accidently clicked on the Overtype icon at the bottom of the Microsoft Word screen.

Have a look at the bottom of the screen, you should find the status bar and you will see the OVR box has black writing. Click it and it will turn to gray and the problem will be gone.

I am running vista Home Premium and MS Office 2003 and for the last couple of months, I have been unable to open any pps attachments. The logo has changed to that of internet explorer and when I click on it, a internet exlporer page appears with option to open/save/cancel the particular pps file. When I click on open, it flashes back to the original email and then back to the internet explorer page and I could continue doing this all day if i desired.
I have found that I can save the file to desktop and opne the file this way, but there must be a reason that this problem has occurred.

What has happened is your computer is associating powerpoint files with the wrong program, in this case Internet Explorer.

To fix it,  go to the Control Panel and choose Default Programs. In this screen, select “Associate a file type or protocol with a program”.

In there, you will get a list of file extensions. Go down the list and choose the PPT extension and click “Change Program”.

You’ll get the Open With dialog, Powerpoint will be one of the listed programs, choose it and click “Okay”.

Exit out of this screen and it should be working.

Hello there i am currently in the process of compiling some new order documents for our Company but i am having trouble finding out how to lock the document but still make certain amendments to it for example:  on this order i want the company details and despatch address locked so they cant be amended but then i want people to be able to fill out the order form too

You don’t mention the program you’re using so I’ll assume it’s Microsoft Word.

To create a form in Word, open a new document, click the View menu and select Toolbars. The form toolbar is one of the options available.

Once you have the forms toolbar up you can then start building your form. To get text and layouts from your existing documents, just copy and paste from the old to the new.

When you are finished, protect the document by clicking the padlock icon on the forms toolbar and then save the document as a template.

You may want to save the template onto a shared drive on your network so it can be used by the right staff. See our post on how to setup a shared templates folder.

How do I share Microsoft Office templates on my network?

It’s a good idea to share standard documents and layouts across the entire business network. It avoids having too many versions being sent out to customers and suppliers.

To do this, first create the standard documents and make sure they are correct. Then save them as templates (.dot or .xlt in Word and Excel).

Then create a folder on one of your shared network folders. Make sure this folder or drive is marked read only for most people as you only want authorised staff to change the documents.

Once you’ve set this up, copy the templates to that folder.

Then on each machine, you will have to open Word click on the Tools menu, choose Options and File Locations.

Highlight the Workgroup Templates item, click modify and enter the network address of the template folder (eg \\server\data\templates).

Save and restart Word. You’ll have to repeat the process on Excel.

The result of this is when staff go to create a new document or spreadsheet from a template, all the standard templates will now appear under the general tab.

I am using Windows Vista home premium and always have difficulty opening any email attachments in Microsoft Word. They automatically default to Microsoft Works Word Processor. How do I change it so I can view them in Microsoft Word?

The problem is Works has been set as the default program for .doc files. You need to change the file association settings for the .doc files.

Probably the simplest way to do this is to remove MS Works, we’d recommend this unless you have a very good reason for running it. Works is not a very good program.

To do this click the Start button, click Control Panel and Programs, you can uninstall it from there.

If you don’t want to uninstall the programs, then you can change the association. To do this, go to the Control Panel and choose Default Programs. In this screen, select “Associate a file type or protocol with a program”.

In there, you will get a list of file extensions. Go down the list and choose the DOC extension and click “Change Program”.

You’ll get the Open With dialog, Word will be one of the listed programs, choose it and click “Okay”.

This will set Word to open all DOC attachment. You may have to do the same thing for Excel spreadsheets, just look for the XLS extension.

Every time I’m opening a wordsheet a question is stated on the screen to enable micros.

One of the older ways to spread viruses was to use malicious macros in Word and Excel. A person could be tricked into opening a word document, a macro would run in the background and infect their computer. The infected computer would then pass on the infected document.

To overcome this, Microsoft introduced a macro security system where only certain macros can be allowed to run.

In the first instance, we’d recommend uninstalling any unused programs and removing an macros from the Word start up routine. We describe how to do this in another post.

You can change the system settings to stop this message. This can be done by opening Word, clicking Tools, Macros and security.

In the Security options click “Low”. You’ll notice this is not recommended and you must have a reliable, up to date virus checker when you do this.

Click okay and the macro message will go away. But remember that your level of security is now not so high.