I got the following problem handed over to me today: “When right-clicking the sheet itself to do operations on a cell, Excel suddenly fails to show the menu.” Some desperate minutes later (about 40 of them) I found at least a workaround:

Close Excel if it is running. Delete the following key in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Options

Reopen Excel and test if it works now. The Options folder recreates itself with a minimum set of contents, and Excel seems to be working well after this.

Funny how Microsoft decided to select for you what you want to install of the Office package. They decided to have “Custom”, “Typical” and “Full” as the main attractions in that department. Now, of these I’d say only “Custom” and “Full” are the interesting ones. Why? Because a “Typical” installation will give you and installation that will – as you explore the application – a number of “Please insert your CD” so you can install the never-used options.

In my opinion, always do a full installation. Hard disk space is inexpensive and time is. Install it all and you do not have to waste time searching for the CD every time.

You write: 100. Excel writes 1. You write 1. Excel writes 0.01. Sounds familiar? This is because “someone” (not you, of course) went into Tools - Options - Edit and turned on Fixed Decimals.

If Word crashes, hangs or has other oddball behavior, you can reset it to its factory settings by doing two things:

• Locate and delete the file normal.dot
• Locate and delete the data registry key
  • Click Start – Run and enter regedit in the text field provided.
  • Click to open the following
    • HKEY_CURRENT_USER
    • Software
    • Microsoft
    • Office
    • 11.0 (Varies as of what version you have)
    • Word
    • Data
  • The Data key will contain two or three subitems, depending on your version of Office: Settings, Toolbars and ToolbarsWordMail. Just delete the entire key.
  • Start and see if Word now works

This is safe to do, as long as you do not have any settings saved in your normal.dot file. By settings I mean autotext entries, macros, or similar.

If you need to insert a date for a specific locale in MS Word, try the following subroutine:

Sub InsertLocalizedDate()
' To insert a date using a particular locale.
Selection.InsertDateTime DateTimeFormat:="dd MMMM yyyy", InsertAsField:= False, DateLanguage:=wdEnglishUK, CalendarType:=wdCalendarWestern, InsertAsFullWidth:=False
End Sub

If you try accomplishing something “simple” that you need for instance MS Word to perform, record a test macro and inspect the resulting macro. There will be a lot of overhead, so remove and trim down as needed and you get yourself the code lines you need for your project to work.