Hands on: Customise Word 2007 ribbons

Trussed up
A nasty 2007 shock came when I tried to open a Word document written in 1992.

Up came a message saying that I was ‘attempting to open a document that was created in an earlier version of Microsoft Office’ and that to help secure my computer ‘Microsoft or the administrator of this computer implemented a registry policy setting that prevents opening this type of file’.

Well, the administrator of this computer – me – certainly hadn’t done this. And I could still open the file in Word 2003. So it must have been Microsoft, which had kindly provided a link to a Knowledgebase article.

So, bristling with indignation, I followed the link and found out that Word 2007 ‘no longer supports documents that were saved in Word for Windows 1 or 2’.

A further link gave instructions on how to modify a registry setting to overcome this. This involved creating five sub-levels of registry keys and a DWORD value, which casts into doubt the veracity of a previously implemented registry policy setting.

Fortunately, there is a much easier way. Go to the Word Options and open the Trust Centre. Click on the Settings button and choose Trusted Locations from the list on the left. In the right-hand pane you see a list of ‘Trusted Locations’. Click the ‘Add new location…’ button and you can add folders to the list of trusted locations.

Lo and behold, if those locations contain Word 1 or 2 files, Word 2007 completely forgets that it no longer supports them and opens them normally. I’ve added My Documents and all its subfolders to the trusted locations, and so far the attack of the killer Word 2 files has yet to happen.

Hot property
One neglected area of all Word versions is document properties. Once you’ve saved a file, if you go to File, Properties, you’ll get a tabbed dialogue showing the properties. The General tab gives you the file information – size, dates, attributes and so on – just like any other Windows file.

The Summary tab, typically, shows only the title – which it takes from the first few words of the document or template – your name, and your company name, if you gave one when you installed Word. Other fields, such as Manager or Category, can be specified in the document template or entered on an ad hoc basis.

The Statistics tab shows the number of words, characters, paragraphs and length of editing time. The Contents tab doesn’t appear to do much – it usually just shows the title. But if you check the ‘Save preview picture’ box on the Summary tab then after you’ve next saved the document, the Contents tab will show all your level one, two and three headings.