Minimise Outlook to the system tray
Outlook 2003 can be minimised to the system tray, but it’s possible with earlier versions of Outlook as well. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\ Outlook\Preferences and create a DWORD entry named ‘MinToTray’. Give it a value of ‘1’. Restart Outlook for the change to take effect.
Give four digits for year in Excel
Whenever a date is entered in an Excel cell, the year field is automatically truncated to two digits. For example, when the user enters the date 9-11-2000 in a cell, it is automatically replaced with 9/11/00. This is bad when spanning across a century, such as records from 1999 to 2003. This tweak makes Excel display dates with four digits for the year field. Locate HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\Microsoft\Office\ [Version]\Excel\Options, where [Version] indicates your Office version (Office XP is‘10.0’, 2000 is ‘9.0’, etc.). Create or modify the DWORD entry ‘EnableFour-DigitYearDisplay’ and enter a value of ‘1’.
Change the number of undo levels in Excel
By default, Excel can perform 16 undo operations. You can customise the number of undo levels, but remember that increasing the number of levels results in more RAM being allocated to Excel. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_ USER\Software\Microsoft\Office \[Version]\Excel\Options. Under this key, create a DWORD value with the name ‘UndoHistory’. You can turn off the undo feature by giving a value of ‘0’, use the maximum allowed …….level ‘100’, or provide an intermediate level of your choice. Remember to select the decimal radio button when entering a value between 0 and 100.
Remove attachments restrictions
When an incoming e-mail has attachments such as EXE, SCR, etc., Outlook XP doesn’t download the attachments, for security reasons. The complete list of file extensions which aren’t downloaded in Outlook XP and 2003 is: ADE, ADP, ASX, BAS, BAT, CHM, CMD, COM, CPL, CRT, EXE, HLP, HTA, INF, INS, ISP, JS, JSE, LNK, MDA, MDB, MDE, MDZ, MSC, MSI, MSP, MST, PCD, PIF, PRF, REG, SCF, SCR, SCT, SHB, SHS, URL, VB, VBE, VBS, WSC, WSF and WSH.If you want Outlook to download any of the above mentioned file extensions, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0 \Outlook\Security (11.0 for Outlook 2003), and create or modify the string entry named ‘Level1Remove’. The value of this entry is the file extension that it will download; so, add the file extensions that you wish Outlook to download, separated by a semicolon—for example, to force Outlook to download EXE and BAT files, assign the value ‘exe;bat’.
Add custom places to the open/save dialog box
In the MS Office Open and Save dialog box, there’s a bar on the right that contains links to common locations such as My Computer, My Documents, etc. Using this tweak, you can add custom locations to this bar. For example, if you often save your work on a network drive, you can add it to the places bar. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\Microsoft\Office\ [Version]\Common\Open-Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces, where ‘[Version]’ indicates the current office version. Create a sub-key with the name ‘PlaceX’, where X is a unique number. In other words, name the first custom location ‘Place1’, the second ‘Place2’, and so on. Now select the newly created sub-key and create two string entries in it: ‘Name’ and ‘Path’. The value for ‘Name’ is whatever you want to call that location and that for ‘Path’ is the exact path to that folder
Other Guides of this series
Techbulb’s Registry Guide 1 : Customize your Operating System
Techbulb’s Registry Guide 3: Enhance the Performance
Techbulb’s Registry Guide 4 : Remove The Annoying Parts
Techbulb’s Registry Guide 5: Make your life easy
