Word 2007 Preview in Vista (Answering a User’s Question)
A user asks:
Hi, Herb
I read a thread you wrote about word 2007 not showing a preview in Vista. I have the same problem and wonder if you have come across a solution?
Thanks, Mike
I never did find a solution, except that it stopped being broken a while ago. I didn’t notice when, but I suspect it’s related to one of the various updates I installed. I’ve applied all of the updates for Office 2007 as well as all of the Vista updates (well, most of them, but all of them related to Windows Explorer).
If you haven’t installed SP1 for Office 2007, that might help. You can tell by checking the version of Word you’re running:
Click the Microsoft Office Button
, and then click Word Options.
Click Resources, and then click About.
To see information about your computer, click System Info.
There is a thread here about people who have the problem:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1149480&SiteID=1
But, it degenerates into a work-around rather than an Office-based solution. I find such discussions exceedingly unsatisfying. But, if you need the functionality and Word refuses to provide it, sometimes it’s the only way.
If you don’t have SP1 and the latest Office/Vista updates, however, I would most certainly try those before resorting to a 3rd party work-around.
I hope this helps.
Cheers,
Herb Tyson
Recovering lost files you accidentally saved after double-clicking an attachment
Do you ever open an attachment in Outlook, edit it in Word, and then save it to the default temporary location without remembering to save it to your Documents or other folder?
In microsoft.public.word.docmanagement, someone named Eric wrote:
I’ve got Windows XP and I’m using Word 2003 and Outlook 2003. When I receive a Word document as an attachment in Outlook, I ordinarily save it immediately in My Documents or a temp folder before I start to edit it. But occasionally I make a mistake, and edit the attachment directly. (I also have a friend who does the same thing, and sometimes calls me for help.) Obviously I save my file. But then when I close the Outlook message and look for my file, it’s gone. Sometimes I’ve been able to recover it and sometimes not. I think Word, or maybe Outlook, may be saving it in a hidden folder.
The same thing happens to me on occasion. When it does, I double-click a *different* attachment so that it opens using Word, hoping that it will put this attachment in the identical temporary file location. I then choose File-Properties, and copy the Location: in the General tab. The reason I open a different attachment is to minimize the chances that Word will overwrite my saved/edited version.
Even though you can’t change the location there, you can select it and copy it to the clipboard. Click in the Location field, press Ctrl+A to select it, as shown here, then press Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard.
I then close the Document Properties box, press Ctrl+O (File Open, in Word), paste the location into the File name field, and press Enter. This takes me to the temp location, where I usually find my saved file. From there, you can open it, save it, copy it, etc.
This sounds complicated… but usually takes only a couple of seconds, and is a lot faster than trying to find the file using Windows Explorer.
The same trick works in Word 2007, as well. Document Properties can be gotten to via Office-Prepare-Properties-Document Properties dropdown arrow-Advanced Properties-General tab. You can also get there from the developer tab. In my own case, I long-ago added the Advanced Document Properties tool to my QAT (Quick Access Toolbar), so I don’t have so many levels to navigate to get to it.
Form region manifest specifies an add-in that is not installed
For the past few months, I’ve had a perplexing mystery in Outlook 2007. During an Outlook session, the first time I clicked the Actions menu item, I got four Microsoft Office Outlook OK boxes in succession. The first said:
The form region IPM.Note.Microsoft.Conversation.Region cannot be opened. The form region manifest specifies an add-in that is not installed.
Then I got three more, identical except for the region specified:
IPM.Note.Microsoft.Conversation.Voice.Region
IPM.Note.Microsoft.Missed.Region
IPM.Note.Microsoft.Missed.Voice.Region
After that, the Actions button works fine. I got the same four OK boxes if I choose Tools®Forms®Choose Form. Again, after that happens, Choose Form worked normally. Either method of triggering the four OK boxes ended the problem for that session. Afterward, the error didn’t return unless Outlook was closed and reopened.
I Googled the problem, and found out the manifest is an XML file of some kind. But, a careful search of my system found no XML files containing anything like those. I asked for help in a forum where Outlook experts hang out… but, nobody had ever seen the problem before.
I tried renaming lots of XML files, just in case, but none fixed the problem. Starting Outlook in safe mode brought relief, but ultimately provided no help, as I disabled every add-in I have, as well as renamed my OutlookVBA.otm file. No joy.
Then, last night, a light bulb went off and I decided to start renaming registry keys in the Outlook tree. But, before I even got that far, I discovered the following in the registry:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\FormRegions
And under it, I found:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\FormRegions.x\IPM.Note.Microsoft.Conversation
…and the other three.
When I renamed …FormRegions as …FormRegions.x, the problem magically stopped. It turns out that the cryptic error message was right on target. The only problem was that it failed to tell me what the @#? the “form region manifest” actually was. In truth, I’m still not sure, only that removing the reference from the registry made the problem go away.
My only guess as to how this happened is that I must have installed and removed a long-forgotten add-in (i.e., “an add-in that is not installed”) at one point, and the removal program failed to clean up after itself when it departed. I just love mysteries with happy endings.