Customize how Office starts or default Office templates

You can have customized document (Word), workbook and worksheet (Excel) or presentation (PowerPoint) opened up as default whenever you start corresponding Microsoft Office application.

In this article I’ll be talking a little bit about file name, content and location for each of three key Microsoft Office components. That is, what to store, where to store and how to name a file.

Duplicating current tab out of omnibar

Most of you probably know this for years, I have discovered this today:

• Ctrl+Enter in browser’s omnibar — open currently entered URL in new window
• Alt+Enter — open in new tab

Tested in Microsoft Edge. Probably works in Chrome and maybe in others.

Works for URL currently entered to the omnibar, not on current page’s URL. Meaning that you can hit F4 then change current page’s URL a little bit and then hit one of those above and get modified URL opened in either new window or tab.

Useful for quickly duplication current tab: F4 + Alt+Enter.

I know that there’s Ctrl+Alt+K, but it seems less natural to be remembered and doesn’t allow to duplicate current tab with modified URL, because it works on current page’s URL.

Prevent PowerPoint from auto-changing typing language

On freshly installed PowerPoint when you start typing any content in any slide, your language will be automatically changed to your keyboard language layout. If you have your presentation in any other language they you’ll start seeing (nearly) every word underlined as not correct, which is very annoying.

Both solutions that I found in the Internet (this one and this one) turned out to be wrong or not enough, so I had to come with my own.

Running Office 365 apps in Safe Mode

There’s a handy Safe Mode for all Office 365 offline apps (and probably for older version of Office as well) that you can use to start any Office app without any add-ins and many other things (like themes, animations, etc.) turned off or disabled. Very handy for diagnosing possible problems with some Office app.

To enable it, simply hold Ctrl key when launching any of Office app. When you see app’s button in the taskbar, release the Ctrl key, click that button and answer Yes in the dialog window that appears:

That would be pretty much all.

Simple data validation or enum fields in Excel

Excel is still often used for simple time tracking or roadmap planning in small IT projects. It is good to know that with a simple steps you can create a basic data validation for certain fields in your sheets.

Kind of validation, as discussed here, focuses on forcing user to select or enter only values that are found in some reference list (dictionary). A classing enum / enumerator field well known in databases. If user provided an incorrect (out of scope) value then an error is displayed:

Unfortunately, due to nature of Microsoft Excel, this fails completely when data is pasted.

Silently delete a folder in Windows and… yourself

Here’s a quick batch file for DOS / Windows that deletes selected folder and then deletes itself:

@echo off
:try
rmdir "C:\Trash\Temp" /S /Q
if exist "C:\Trash\Temp" goto try
del %0

Creating an endless loop for deleting a folder stinks like a hell, but I haven’t figured out anything better so far.

Get rid of “Pick up where you left off” from Word — three methods

Microsoft loves to “enrich” our lives with a wonderful (in their opinion) yet totally useless and pissing off (in our opinions) features. The “Pick up where you left off” is one of them.

This tiny little thing wouldn’t be so irritating and could be easily ignored, if it wouldn’t be for a single fact. It blocks keyboard shortcuts completely, until it hides itself (so for approx. 3-5 seconds)! Preventing you from pressing Ctrl+F to do an ultra-fast-searching-millisecond-after-opening-a-document (my beloved feature).

There’s a fairly easy solution to this problem (my own article) that requires you to do some dirty tricks in the Windows Registry. One and a half month after writing that article it turned out that a method described there simply isn’t working at all on one of my computers. So I came out with the following post.

Disable “Pick up where you left off” in Word

The “Pick up where you left off” is one of the worst features that Microsoft added to Word, because it prevents you from quickly opening and searching the document. With this feature enabled, now you have to wait approx. 3-5 seconds after you open any document and before you can hit Ctrl+F.

Disabling this feature is fairly easy, but — because this is Microsoft — again involves messing up with the Windows Registry, so you need administrator account in order to perform these steps.

How to get “Microsoft Print to PDF” virtual printer back to Windows 10

I have removed “Microsoft Print to PDF” virtual printer from my Windows and getting it back was a little bit more painful than I previously anticipated. Some solutions found in Internet simply turned out to be worthless. Finally, I found a solution that was both easy and working.

I decided to write this little memo to not look for it again.

Remove one-letter word (orphans) from the end of line

In English an orphan is:

A paragraph-opening line that appears by itself at the bottom of a page or column, thus separated from the rest of the text

Thus, in English typography it is understood in the context of the whole paragraph. Single line of a new paragraph, left alone on the preceding page (before page break) is not allowed.

Polish language is more strict by that and “explores” an alternative (less known) definition of “orphan”. In Polish typography this term is understood in the context of single line and regarded as a:

Single word (single letter in most cases) left along at the end of line (next to right paragraph).

And similarly this is prohibited in Polish typesetting.

In this article you can find a Word macro for removing such orphans from your text.