Using and Customizing Common Dialog Boxes
The Office File Open and File Save As dialog boxes have a series of shortcut icons on the left side, called the Places Bar (see Figure 3.3), designed to speed navigation through common file locations:
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Figure 3.3 The Places Bar on the left of the Open and Save As dialog boxes can be easily customized. Put commonly used data folders here for quicker access.
History—Opens the Recent folder, which contains shortcuts to files and folders that you've worked with. Office maintains up to 20 shortcuts for each file type in this folder. When you click this icon from within an Office program, Office displays only shortcuts appropriate to the application you're using.
My Documents—Opens the personal data folder for the user currently logged on. As noted earlier, Windows enables you to change the target folder that Office opens when you click this icon.
Desktop—Opens or saves files on the Windows desktop. Use the desktop as a holding area when you want to create a file and move it elsewhere using the Windows Explorer. Using the desktop as a permanent storage area is generally a bad idea because most Office applications have a tendency to create temporary files in the same location as the file you're working with.
Favorites—Displays the contents of Internet Explorer's Favorites menu.
My Network Places—Lets you manage files stored in shared folders on your network or on Web/FTP servers.
NOTE
Don't confuse the Office Recent folder with the Windows system folder of the same name. Office manages a separate Recent folder for each user profile on a system. To manage the Office shortcuts from an Explorer window, open the user profile folder (on a Windows 98/Me machine, this is typically C:\Windows\Profiles\<username>; in Windows 2000/XP, it's C:\Documents and Settings\<username>) and look in \Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Recent.
In Open and Save dialog boxes, Office includes two features that make it easier to find a file by name:
As you type in the File Name box, the AutoComplete feature suggests the first name that matches the characters that you've typed so far. Keep typing, or press Enter to accept the suggestion. Note that the list of files does not scroll as you type.
If you click in the list of files and then type a character, Office selects the first file that begins with the letter or number that you typed. If you quickly type several characters in rapid succession, the selection moves to the first file that begins with those characters. If you pause for more than a second between characters, this type-ahead feature resets. Note that as you select files in this fashion, Office does not fill in the File Name box.
To adjust the display of files in the Open and Save As dialog boxes, use the Views button. The drop-down arrow lets you choose from a list of views, or you can click the button to cycle through the following four icon arrangements:
Large Icons, Small Icons, and List mirror their counterparts in Windows Explorer.
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Details displays size, file type, and other information, as shown in Figure 3.4; click any heading to sort the list by that category. (If you think that the information in the Type column is useless, we agree. Skip to the "Secrets of the Office Masters: Details, Details" section at the end of this chapter for details on how to make the Details view much more useful.)
Properties displays summary information about the selected document in the right half of the dialog box.
Preview displays a thumbnail version of the document in the right half of the dialog box as you move from file to file in the list. In general, you should avoid this option because of the performance penalty you pay: As you scroll through a dialog box, the program that you're working with has to open each file; find an import filter, if necessary; and generate the preview. Switch to this view when you want to quickly verify that the file you're about to open is the correct one, and then switch back to List or Details view after peeking at the file.
Thumbnails displays a thumbnail image of all graphics files and some Office documents.
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Figure 3.4 Click the Views button to change the arrangement of icons in the Open and Save As dialog boxes.
Some files, especially certain Excel worksheets, can't be seen in the Preview pane. For suggestions on the possible reasons, see "No Preview in Common Dialog Boxes," in the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of this chapter.TIP
To manage files in Open and Save As dialog boxes, select the filename and right-click. Shortcut menus here work just as they do in an Explorer window. You can move, copy, delete, or rename a file, for example, as long as the file that you select is not currently open.
Customizing Common Dialog Boxes
The Places Bar can be customized to make it easier and faster to get to frequently used folders. To add your own folders to the Places Bar, select the icon for the folder that you want to add, and then choose Tools, Add to "My Places." To remove a custom location from the Places Bar, right-click its icon and choose Remove from the shortcut menu. (You can't rename or delete the five default locations on the Places Bar.)
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If you add more icons than can be displayed in the Places Bar, small scroll arrows appear at the top and bottom of the list. You can see more icons in the Places Bar if you right-click it and choose Small Icons. Put no more than 15 locations in the Places Bar; with any more, you'll spend too much time scrolling.
To rearrange folders in the Places Bar, right-click an icon that you want to move, and choose Move Up or Move Down.
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Both the Open and Save As dialog boxes can be resized by clicking and dragging on any of the edges or corners.
Naming Documents
Office documents must follow these file-naming rules:
A filename may contain any alphanumeric character, including the letters A to Z and numbers from 0 to 9.
A filename may be as short as 1 character and as long as a total of 255 characters, including the full path—drive letter, colon, backslashes, and folder names included.
The following special characters are allowed in a filename: $ % - _ @ ~ ´ ! ( ) ^ # & + , ; =.
You may use spaces, brackets ([ ]), curly braces ({ }), single quotation marks, apostrophes, and parentheses within a filename.
You may not use a slash (/), a backslash (\), a colon (:), an asterisk (*), a question mark (?), a quotation mark ("), or angle brackets (< >) as part of a filename. These characters are reserved for use with the file system, and you'll see an error message if the name that you enter includes any of these characters.
Office files typically include a three-letter extension, which is added automatically by the application that created the file (such as .doc for files created by Word). However, a file extension is not required, nor are file extensions restricted to three characters. To force an Office program to use the exact name and extension that you specify, enter the full name, including the extension, between quotation marks.
A filename may contain one or more periods. Windows treats the last period in the name as the dividing line between the filename and its extension.
CAUTION
The rules governing maximum length of a filename include the full path. For this reason, moving a file with a long name can cause problems, especially when the destination folder is deeply nested. In practice, you can avoid this problem and still have descriptive names if you keep filenames to a maximum length of about 40 characters.
CAUTION
If you use a nonstandard file extension, you might be unable to open the file from an Explorer window. Also, files that include unregistered file extensions do not appear in the Open dialog box unless you choose All Files from the drop-down list of file types.
NOTE
Windows filenames are not case sensitive. Office ignores all distinctions between upper- and lowercase letters when entering a filename in an Open or Save As dialog box.
NOTE
If you encounter problems when sharing files with coworkers who use 16-bit Windows or DOS programs, see "Dealing with Short Filenames," in the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of this chapter.
Using Alternative File Formats
By default, Office applications save data files in their own binary formats. That's the correct choice in most circumstances, but when you share files with a coworker who does not use a recent version of Office, you might need to open or save a file in a different format.
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In previous Office versions, Rich Text Format (RTF) was often your best choice for saving a file and using it with other programs, especially from software companies other than Microsoft. No more. Nowadays you'll probably find that the easiest way to share data is HTML, which is virtually guaranteed to be readable by any other person, even on a computer without a single byte of Microsoft code.
Office includes a wide range of file converters to help translate files into other popular formats, including those for earlier versions of Office. Normally, Office programs open any file created in a compatible format without requiring any extra work on your part. The file that you want to convert might not be visible in the Open dialog box if it ends with an extension that the Office program doesn't recognize. To see all files with extensions normally associated with a given file type, such as WK1 and WKS files for Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet files, select the appropriate entry from the Files of Type drop-down list. (If you can't see any extensions in Explorer windows or dialog boxes, open Explorer's Folder Options dialog box, click the View tab, and uncheck the Hide File Extensions for Known File Types box.
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To see all files in the Open dialog box, regardless of their extension, choose All Files from the Files of Type drop-down list. Some other distinctions in this drop-down list are less obvious but still useful. For example, selecting Word Documents filters the list to show only files with that file type and the *.doc extension, whereas All Word Documents includes Web pages (*.htm) and Word templates (*.dot), as well as ordinary Word documents. Likewise, the All PowerPoint Presentations choice includes any HTML file in addition to PowerPoint presentations and shows.
To save a file in an alternative format, choose File, Save As. In the Save As dialog box, choose an entry from the Save as Type drop-down list.
Office displays the full range of compatible file types in both the Open and Save As dialog boxes. In some cases, you might need to supply the Office CD to install a particular converter before opening or saving a file in that format.
To help ensure that Word files that you create can be accessed by users with other versions of Office, see "Avoiding Compatibility Problems," p.330.
To learn more about Excel file compatibility, see "File Compatibility Issues," p.539.