Good Grief

What in the world would we do without Google?

Long ago I wrote a Word macro that is run when I click on an icon "Edit Clipboard". The idea is that you copy onto the clipboard text that you want to process in Word. Word is started up and the clipboard is pasted into a new document. A form with a "Done?" button appears. When you are done editing, if you click on Done, it copies the contents of the document back onto the clipboard and closes Word.

I used it today and got an annoying error message: "...Create Adobe PDF Monitor..." not running. I googled for this message and found the answer. Microsoft Office startups (including .DOT files) are scattered around. The errant .DOT was not where I looked first. Once found, I flushed it. The suggestion had me looking at the projects loaded into Word VBE when I open Word. There were projects from 8 years ago! Searching for all .DOT files on my C: drive, I found all of the old .DOTs that were no longer being used. Once they were deleted, they disappeared from the list of projects in Word VBE.

... On the subject of PDFs (Adobe Acrobat files) ...
The Adobe PDF reader has gotten larger and larger over time. I've heard that it is a target for viruses now. It loads slowly and frequently gets in your face about updating this or that. I have replaced it with FoxIt reader, keeping Adobe Acrobat Reader to be used only by "open with".

My old version of Adobe Acrobar writer would balk at creating a PDF from a PDF. I replaced it with pdfFactory, which is quick and flexible.

Examples:

1. I have purchased 72 issues of Access Advisor magazine. Each issue is manifested as a 75-page PDF file. Most articles are interrupted by one or more (usually more) full-page advertisements. It is so annoying when viewing in a PDF viewer or printing. Those ads waste a lot of ink or toner. Now I can find an article to print, print pages until an ad appears, skip over the ad pages, and continue on. The pages are appended into a new PDF. Wonderful!

2. I receive excellent investment articles each day from Morningstar.com. To save the article without the menus and extraneous information, I use Firefox and the extension Nuke Anything Enhanced. I simply drag across parts of the screen that I don't want to save and right-click on Remove Selection. Or right click on an object and chose Remove This Object. When finished, I simply use pdfFactory to save the article as a PDF. (This produces a more satisfactory result than trying to paste into Word.)

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Microsoft has shown contempt for power users by dumbing down Office 2007. Where's the File, Edit, View ... Help menu? Gone! The ribbon is great for newbies. But respect those that have used Word and Excel since DOS days! I ran my commercial application (developed in Access 2003) in Access 2007 and it ran, but a lot of the screen was occupied by menus that I do not need or want. It appears that Microsoft is young thinking -- "It's all about me."

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SQL Server Express 2005 and Virtual PC 2007, on the other hand, are quite wonderful. Especially when you consider the price: $0.00.

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Last weekend was spent nerding out at the annual PAUG Database Developer Conference. It was excellent! Alison Balter, writer of 14 technical books, was one of the featured speakers. She mentioned that she would not use Vista if her job didn't require it. Her laptop blue-screened twice on a single plane ride from California to Oregon.

Makes you appreciate XP!