The Connected Home Blog

The heart of the connected home is the digital information it allows to be stored and communicated with ease. We often think of this in terms of the web, music or video, but electronic documents are also an essential from of digital media, albeit one that we tend to take for granted as it is less flashy and ‘new media’.

We see writing a letter and emailing it as an attachment as a very basic task and one which we probably do at work with report, letters, presentations and spreadsheets many times a day without really thinking about is.

Unfortunately this simple task become someone more complicated for me recently and it took quite a lot of digging around and frustration to come up with the relevant solution and to fix the problem (actually two problems)

My main PC is a HP Pavilion Slimline running Vista Home Premium. It is a nice computer and does many of the things I need it to without problems. I run mostly Microsoft software as that is my personal preference and I like the way that the various applications interact and so I have Office 2007 Home & Student installed.

Last week, without having done anything notable to change my system Word stopped working for me.

I have posted a run through of the problems in posts How To: Fix problems with MS Word 2007 - Issue 1 and Issue 2. I hope this helps anyone else having similar problems.

Matt S

Note: This applies to all programs within Office 2007 not just Word.

Since installing Office 2007 Home & Student I have always been frustrated that one feature I used to use regularly now seemed to be removed or restricted, perhaps only available in the pro version I thought.

The ‘Send To Mail Recipient’ action on the ‘File’ menu was grayed out requiring me to save files and then locate them though my email client if I wanted to send them as an attachment. Not the biggest inconvenience but frustrating when I could do this with my previous version of Office.

After more investigation it turns out that this isn’t the case at all and is a bug. There is a Knowledge Base article giving more information and solutions and below i have extracted the key steps I followed to solve the problem.

I hope this helps anyone who has also missed this feature.

(This solution is as per Windows Vista, you may need to make some amends to the paths etc. for XP.)

1. Close all programs.

2. Open the registry editor by going to Start- >All programs->Accessories->Run (alternatively type run in the Vista search box and hit enter)
3. Type in ‘regedit’ to the command prompt and click OK

4. Locate and then click the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Messaging Subsystem

5. Locate the following registry values.

If any of these registry values are missing, follow these steps to add the values: a.

1. Click the Windows Messaging Subsystem subkey, point to New on the Edit menu, and then click String Value.
2. Type the name of the missing value, and then press ENTER.
3. Click the new value, and then click Modify on the Edit menu.
4. In the Edit String dialog box, type the correct value for the missing string value in the Value data box.
5. Repeat these steps for each value that is missing from the table
6. On the File menu, click Exit.

Let me know if this works for you.

Matt S

I recently ran into trouble with Microsoft Word not working, below is an explanation of the problem and the solution I found. I hope this helps anyone with similar problems.

What I could and could not do:

• Could not open files from folders (got an empty Word screen with no document)
• Could open document from the file menu within Word
• Could not click in to text on the page
• Could navigate to text using arrow keys
• When closing word it would crash and say that ‘Microsoft Word has stopped working’
• Could save documents

I didn’t get to the bottom of why or how this happened as I was only really interested in getting Word to work again but from reading a number of forums it looks like a lot of people had to spend a long time on the phone with Microsoft to resolve the problem.

The fix requires some changes to the system registry which sounds scary, but having never done such a change before, and being no way technical I managed fine. This is as per Windows Vista, you may need to make some amends to the paths etc. for XP.

1. Open the registry editor by going to Start- >All programs->Accessories->Run (alternatively type run in the Vista search box and hit enter)
2. Type in ‘regedit‘ to the command prompt
3. Follow this path by selecting the folders at the left of the screen:  HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Office/12.0/Word
4. By right clicking on the ‘Data’ and ‘Options‘ folders select ‘rename‘ and change them to ‘oldData‘ and ‘oldOptions‘.
5. Exit the editor and restart word.

Apparently Word creates new folders and files to replace those which have been renamed and the new ones work.

Let me know if this works for you too.

Matt S

You might notice that there is a new button lurking in the subscribe section to the right of the page. We are now able to offer Windows Live alerts to users when new information is posted on TCHB.

Simply click the button and sign in if you have a Windows Live account (if you don’t I recommend getting one).

You will then be able to select how you want to receive your alerts, via Windows Live Messenger, email or mobile device if you have the service activated.

The service is still in beta (more info here) but allows any RSS feed to be piped to various end points without any programming or development making life easier for bloggers and webmasters to publish their information to more mediums with the minimum of fuss.

So go on, give it a go and sign up now.

Matt S

As expected Microsoft have confirmed that they will stop making the HD-DVD add-on drive for the Xbox 360. Following the decision by Toshiba to stop producing players and recorders following both poor sales and the defection of high profile supporters to the rival Blu-ray Disc format, Microsoft’s move seemed inevitable. The company has however committed to to continue to provide warranty support to customers of the add-on, thought to make up about a third of the 1 million total HD-DVD players sold.

We now have to wait and see if this move will see Microsoft release a Blu-ray Disc player in place of the HD-DVD drive or whether we will see an even greater focus on establishing Xbox Live as the medium of choice for consumers looking to watch high definition movies.

Matt S