PCR's notepad » Microsoft

How to use lasso selection in MS Office 2010

David Dernoncourt — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 05:15:27 +0000

This bug is just unfreakinbelievable. It was spotted as soon as in December 2009 in some Word 2010 beta release (maybe before, but that’s the earliest report I found) and has never been fixed, Microsof being apparently happy enough with it. To describe it briefly, when drawing shapes you can’t use the mouse to click-hold-select multiple shapes.

A developer reply to this bug report was:

sadly the work needed to make the object selection work as it did in Word 2007 was out of scope for this release

(Peter Frem – Program Manager | Office Word)

So, live with that bug and use [hold CTRL] + click… Feels a bit like stone age, doesn’t it? Ever heard of Windows Neanderthal Technology?

However, the issue got discussed again six months later, after the final release, and someone reported that multiple selection works properly in compatibility mode. Thus the “best” fix seems to be to work in compatibility mode: work on your drawings in a separate document, which you’ll save in Word 97/2003 format… So, here’s your fix. Or maybe you’ll want to give OpenOffice a try?

In case you’re interested to know more, further reading taught me that the issue was caused by the new graphics engine, which made it too hard to program the feature in time for release…

More sources:

Another thread about the issue

Update (2011-02-20): as reported in the first comment, it turns out that the hold’n drag multiselection does work in Office 2010 documents in the case of objects placed inside a special drawing area (called a “drawing canvas”). See screenshot below on how to easily insert one:

Preventing MS Office from hiding your menu items

David Dernoncourt — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:00:04 +0000

One of the numerous annoyances with Microsoft Office, apart from the fact that it’s quite often enforced by your boss as THE working standard, is its tendency to make your life harder. To do so, Bill Gates’s minions designed several malicious plans. One of those simply consists in regularly modifying the program’s menu. And to make it harder, they chose to hide only the menu items you most rarely use, i.e. … the ones you find hardest to find!

Windows hides infrequently used items to make it easier for you to find the menu items you use the most [and to make it harder to find the items you use the less].
(source: Working with menus)

So, what can you do to prevent Word, Excel, PowerPoint and others to play with their menus and your nerves? In your MS Office program, go to Tools → Customize → Options, and check “always show full menus”. That’s all folks.

Don’t use Hotmail, it’s a trap!

David Dernoncourt — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:54:42 +0000

A few weeks ago, I created once again a Hotmail/MSN account, as it’s a quite convenient way to get a discardable IM + e-mail account. Then, I eventually found out that I rather liked this account and would like to keep this alias to use it with Gmail.

I thought: no problem, I just need to configure Gmail to allow sending as myaccount@hotmail.com, and to configure hotmail to forward my e-mails to Gmail. Of course, I had naively forgotten that Hotmail is run by Micro$$$$oft. Guess what? My e-mails are trapped, they just can’t get out of Microsoft clusters:

You can forward your mail to one other e-mail address that ends in hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com, or is part of Windows Live Custom Domains.

At this point I knew that the long term result is that I’ll drop this alias. Still, I wanted to know more about this “Windows Live Custom Domains” thing. First, when arriving on their site, I found it’d been renamed:

Windows Live Admin Center
Windows Live Custom Domains is now Windows Live Admin Center

Yeah, apparently, Microsoft aren’t able to update their error messages as fast as they rename their services. But never mind. Willing to make sure this service was free, I tried to open the service for my domain:

Quite funny, Windows Live thinks the name “wiki4games” is inappropriate. On the other side, “patheticcockroach” (which gave me some problems on quite a few sites with misconfigured filters – even, a while ago, on Wikipedia) is appropriate… Whatever…

Does issuing passports make Microsoft a country?

David Dernoncourt — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 06:49:00 +0000

Just found this article… made me realize that MS passport has been here for some time already… Some interesting stuff about bypassing cookie privacy protection.

Read on

The 5 sins of Vista

David Dernoncourt — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 22:35:00 +0000

From a fan of Microsoft : the top 5 reasons why Vista is a step backward from previous versions of Windows.

Read on

Despite 100 Million IE 7 Installs, Microsoft’s Browser Still Loses Ground

David Dernoncourt — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 16:47:00 +0000

Good news for web developpers, according to Net Applications, Internet Explorer accounted for 79.6% of all browsers used in December 2006, a drop from the 80.6% during the previous month. Firefox’s use, meanwhile, measured 14% in December, up from 13.5% in November. Also gaining ground in the last month of 2006 was Apple’s Safari, which climbed to 4.2% from 4%, and Opera, which saw its share increase from 0.7% to 0.9%.