Sometimes Microsoft's Office suite seems to be a benevolent monster--like Godzilla. When it's on your side, it's a powerful ally. But when it's rampaging all over your files, you want to run screaming through the streets of Tokyo. Here's how to leash the Office beast.
Illustration: Randall Enos
Nuke Word's Canvas
Surely the most obnoxious new feature (introduced in Word 2002) is the Drawing Canvas, which confuses the living daylights out of novices and gurus alike. Whenever you use a tool in the Drawing toolbar in Word 2002 or 2003 (or click Insert, Picture, New Drawing), Word insists on creating a box--called a "canvas"--to hold the graphic. When you put pictures, lines, squares, ovals, or other drawings in the canvas, Word treats them as a group, so you can move or resize them as one unit or add snap-to connectors between the drawing elements. Microsoft says it wanted to help users move or resize drawings quickly--but I think the company invented the Drawing Canvas to get snap-to connectors to work without investing in a costly redesign.
To get rid of the Drawing Canvas, click Tools, Options, General, and uncheck Automatically Create Drawing Canvas When Inserting AutoShapes. To move or resize drawings as a group, select the drawings by pressing Ctrl while clicking them, and then choose Draw, Group on the Drawing Toolbar. If you need to use snap-to connectors, click Insert, Picture, New Drawing to place a big, ugly Drawing Canvas inside your sleek, svelte document.
Reorder the My Places Bar
Every time you open a file in an Office XP or 2003 app by clicking File, Open or by pressing Ctrl-O, a list of icons appears in the left pane. The My Places Bar lets you open folders with just one click; but even though it rates as a first-class time-saver, this feature suffers from one of the worst user interfaces in all of Office-dumb, er, -dom. To add a folder to the My Places Bar, select the folder and click Tools, Add to "My Places" near the top-right of the dialog box. To show ten small folder icons on the My Places Bar instead of five big ones (see FIGURE 1), right-click the bar and choose Small Icons. You can rearrange the folders in the bar by right-clicking a folder and choosing Move Up or Move Down, one step at a time. Blecch!
The homely interface notwithstanding, My Places' biggest problem is that it's buggy. If you've removed a few icons from the list, the options Move Up and Move Down may appear grayed out on the menu. When this happens, rearranging the icons requires a trip to the Windows Registry. Before you begin, make sure you have a Registry backup for safety's sake. Click here for step-by-step backup instructions.
When your backup is complete, click Start, Run, type regedit, and press Enter. Navigate in the left pane to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\Open Find\Places (in Office XP, the fifth key in the sequence is 10.0, not 11.0). Under both the StandardPlaces and UserDefinedPlaces keys, you'll discover entries for each My Places icon. Select the icon that you want to appear first on the My Places Bar, double-click the Index entry in the right pane, change its 'Value data' to 1, and click OK. (If there is no Index entry, right-click the right pane, select New, DWORD Value, type Index, and press Enter.) Repeat these steps for the other My Places icons, giving each one a different Index value (a value of '0' will cause the icon not to appear, unless all icons are set to '0', in which case the Desktop is displayed). The next time you open Office with the My Places Bar showing, the icons will appear in the pane ordered in the sequence you previously specified in your Registry edit.
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