Record preference settings for easier future rebuilds

Dec 28, '04 08:58:00AM

Contributed by: Norm Nager

I wish to offer a specific hint that I created for Microsoft Office preferences and tailored to preferences for other applications. When Word, Excel or Entourage gets corrupted and nothing else seems to work, trashing a number of preferences for the application plus some for Office, itself, may solve the problem. But it's hard to remember when reconstructing the several pages of preferences for each Office application which boxes you had checked and what choices you had made in selecting other prefs. To spare myself the extra time (and errors) of pondering over each choice, I did the following:

  1. Opened each preference and took a screen shot.
  2. Created an Entourage Note for each Office 2004 application (For those who do not use Entourage, any software for saving and retrieving notes, such as iData 2, will do.)
  3. While looking at a given screenshot, typed in and boldfaced the name so I could easily spot it
  4. Entered relevant info on choices made (I did not bother with unchecked boxes, for example).
You could stop with just making screenshots and saving them in a folder. But because I change preferences from time to time, I decided to invest the extra time in creating the Entourage Notes rather than making a new screenshot each time. It's also faster for me to access the note by searching for a combination of "Word" and "Preference" in Entourage Notes. Should Entourage itself be corrupted, I copied the note on Entourage preferences into iData 2, where I can do an even faster search with less steps.

I started with Office 2004 because of the hundreds of preferences it involves. But the same system works well for other programs in which one has done more than select default preferences.

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