While working at a customer site a couple of users reported Word 2007 has no page number gallery when you go Insert -> Page Numbers. After investigating I found that just deleting the Building Blocks.dotx file in their profile fixed the problem.

Windows XP Location:
c:\Documents and Settings\{your username}\Application Data\Microsoft\Document Building Blocks\1033\Building Blocks.dotx

Windows Vista & 7 Location:
c:\Users\{your username}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Document Building Blocks\1033\Building Blocks.dotx

Back several months ago I tried to update my laptop to Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6).  Most things worked great, but at the end of the week when I started doing some of my reports, I noticed lots of file system problems.  The Word documents I was editing would become read-only after I saved them once.  New documents I created would be read-only.  As I got to digging, I found that any files I created on the file server were being created with empty permissions (as viewed from my laptop), and read-only permissions (via the checkbox) as viewed from the Windows side.  I found lots of people having the same problem with no real workaround.  I noticed the permissions would fix when I viewed them from the Finder, or when I did an ‘ls –l’ from the command line.  I restored my system back to Leopard from my backup (which was nice to have available) and waited for a fix.  Well, the fix came in the recent release of Snow Leopard 10.6.3.  I’ve updated again and everything works great.

I think we all know better than to download executable programs (.exe's) from untrusted sources and run them.  Opening a Word document from an untrusted source could be dangerous.  Now, even opening a PDF file on a fully patched Windows machine with excellent, up-to-date anti-virus and malware software could cause your machine to get owned.

Didier Stevens, who has written some great PDF analysis tools, published a disturbing blog post the other day.  He demonstrates how to use an existing feature in PDF to execute a program on someone's computer when they open the document.  Adobe Acrobat Reader displays a message first, but the message can be changed to social engineer someone into clicking the Open button on the message.  And my favorite PDF reader, Foxit, does not even display this message.  Disabling javascript does not help. Read More...

I have had problems with Word crashing when I try to open a document, particularly when online and opening a Word document on the file server.  I can usually get it to work if I open Word first and then open a document but even that doesn't work at times.

I finally found a post online mentioning problems with add-ins.  I looked at the add-ins and my Adobe Acrobat installation had installed a PDF add-in, my scanning application had installed 2 PDF add-ins and I had the add-in from Microsoft to create PDF files.  I disabled the PDF add-ins and have not had the problem since. Read More...

Access keys provide a way to quickly use a command by pressing a few keys, no matter where you are in the program. Every command in Office Word 2007 can be accessed by using an access key. You can get to most commands by using two to five keystrokes. To discover and use an access key: Read More...