The latest version of this application is Word Viewer 2003, which helps users view MS Word 2003 files without the compatible application. It’s an easy single step to downloading the new word viewer – you just need to visit the following Microsoft Web site. For other versions of the Word viewer, you can also go here, which is also part of the Microsoft website.

Note, Microsoft 97-2000 Word Viewer isn’t available for download anymore. Instead, if you need that application you just need to download the 2003 version mentioned above, which is compatible with all earlier versions.

 

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Downloading the New Word Viewer

It can be an IT nightmare to re-install software.  Many times, there’s no paper trail to lead you to the product keys that were used for the installation of Microsoft Office.  But since XP and Vista have tied those product keys to the machine the software is installed on, you’ve got to find a way to retrieve the product keys before you can begin the re-installation process.  Obviously, this article will require that you have Microsoft Office already installed on the machine, and simply need to find out what the product key is, so that you can re-install, for instance, to put in a new hard drive.

The good news is that someone has been through the nightmare before you, and there have been keyfinder programs developed to help resolve the situation.  The Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is one such program, and can be used to retrieve the product keys for Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, and even MS Server 2003 and 2008.  For Microsoft office, it can find the keys for all versions except MS Office 2000, and even that one may have been added by the time you read this.  This list does not include all of the keys that keyfinder will dig out for you, but many of the others pertain to Microsoft games, and are beyond the scope of this article.

The magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is not an installed program on the computer it is used on.  Simply unzip the file package into a folder of your choosing, and run it.  There are no set up wizards, no complicated processes, and nothing that one could consider fancy.  It is designed to do one thing, retrieve product keys from the system registry.  As soon as you run the program, it will scan the registry, and “discover” what keys exist for you.

Even though the Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is not designed as a software piracy tool, it is sometimes categorized that way, and the methods it uses may even be interpreted by your virus software as a malicious program at work.  For this reason, it may be a good idea to disconnect the network connection and temporarily disable virus protection before using the tool.  Be sure to enable virus protection again when you have finished using the Magical jelly bean!  This utility is not a product key generation tool!  If you do not have a successfully installed version of the software on the machine, using the Magical Jelly Bean won’t be of any use in finding a product key.

To get the Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder, visit:
http://www.magicaljellybean.com/

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Post from: MyComputerAid.com Computer support

Find your Microsoft Office license key

It is possible to recover files that you were working on if the system crashes, the power fails, or some such calamity causes the computer to shut down.  Microsoft Office programs, such as Excel and Word, or even Powerpoint, create autosave files periodically.  By default, the autosave feature usually saves the files at around 10 minute intervals, but you can change this to be even more frequent, which is good if you happen to be working with documents that may changes drastically in the course of a short period of time.  Even if you haven’t planned for a sudden power outtage, this applications can often retrieve files that were stored temporarily on disk.

Because the way the autosave and autorecovery features have changed in different versions, this article can be considered as a general guideline, and small corrections should become self-evident as you go through the process.

The first task is to be able to identify your files.  By default, a tempory file is crated in the “C: Documents and Settings<username>Application DataMicrosoft” director when a new file is begun.  If the file is created on a network drive, then look on that drive for the file.  The filename will vary depending on the type of file, and the application it belongs to, but most of the commonly used names are given below.  There may be other types of files as well, but the ones listed are most likely the ones that can be recovered.

PowerPoint:
Temp file for PowerPoint: pptxxx.tmp

Excel
Temp file for excel:

Word
Many times, just starting Word will recovery a file that was in progress.  Do not attempt to load a file, just open the Word application.  If it doesn’t automatically recover what you were working on, look in one of these directories:

“C: Documents and Settings<username>Application DataMicrosoftWord”.
“C: Documents and Settings<username>Local SettingsTemp”

For a file that looks similar to (“xxxx” represents a number):
Word document: ~wrdxxxx.tmp
Temp document: ~wrfxxxx.tmp
Auto recovery file: ~wraxxxx.tmp
A complete autorecovery file will have the extension of .wbk.

You may be able to simply open the file in Notepad.exe.  This would result in the loss of formatting, but you could at least retrieve the lost text.  In the event that it does not automatically restore, try notepad as the second course of action.

Excel
Excel doesn’t have the AutoSave feature enabled as default, you have to add it. This is because it isn’t always practical to have this functionality enabled. To enable the AutoSave feature, you have to use an Add In. Go to “Tools” “Add ins” and choose “AutoSave”.  In Office XP, AutoSave has been moved to Options, similar to Word.

Auto saved files may be found in this directory:
“C: Documents and Settings<username>Local SettingsTemp”

The filename could be displayed in a couple of ways:
~dfxxxx.tmp
31.tmp

PowerPoint
Powerpoint automatically saves files at 10 minute intervals by default.  It saves the files to the same directory as Excel and word, namely:
“C : Documents and Settings<username>Local SettingsTemp”

The filename convention is:
pptxxx.tmp

One final clue:

If you have been working on a file for hours and the document was created via copying and pasting or at one point had cut the entire page or document to paste some place and then placed something else on the clip board, the data may not have been lost. This is because when any info is copied it is sent to a temp file with the name ~wrlxxxx.tmp. Therefore you could search your system for files of this name and then use the same “Drag and Drop” technique to view the data in Notepad to recover the data.

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Recover autosave files in office

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is a suite of productivity applications crated in Open Source, and expressly intended to end Microsoft’s domination of the field with their Microsoft Office suite of applications.  Because the name Open Office was already owned, the “.org” was appended to the name.  As Open Source software, OOo is highly configurable, with numerous add-ons, languages, and it runs on several OS platforms.  Another feature of OOo is that it has the ability to save files in many formats, and is one of the very few applications on the Windows market that utilizes the the industry standard format of ODF (Open Document Format).  This article is written with Writer, the word processing application of OOo, and then saved in Microsoft Word “.DOC”, and plaint text “.TXT” formats.

OOo contains equivalent versions of the applications found in MS Office.  Word, Excel, and Powerpoint are represented, as well as drawing and database applications. In fact, it has been pointed out that OOo will even correctly open documents that are mildly corrupted which were originally saved in MS Office, that Office itself is not able to to open.  From a competitive standpoint, OOo is the only product which actively competes with the MS Office suite on every level, and in performance tests it has been found to load and run faster.  It is described as being more flexible, and has the further distinction of having versions available for several operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Solaris/Open Solaris, and OS X.  It is free to download and use (even in commercial settings), requires no licensing, and has no limits on the number of computers a single copy may be installed on.  It is Open source, and released under the LGPL Open Source Software license.  In addition, all users are encouraged to report and bugs, request new features to be added, or even modify the software to meet their own needs.

OOo is a descendant of Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice.  But where Sun continues to develop StarOffice under protected licensing, OOo has been released as Open Source, which has opened many avenues of collaboration and improvement.  It currently consists of 5 modules Base (database), Draw (graphic design), Impress (presentation creator, like Powerpoint), Calc (spreadsheet), and Writer (word processor).  It also includes features that are not available in other packages, such as the ability to crate .PDF files directly, without having to convert from a different format.  OOo is another excellent example of what can be done through Open Source, and is poised to become a world leader in document production in much the same way that Mozilla Firefox has become a leader in web browsers.  If you aren’t using OOo yet, it might be worth your time to investigate further at http://openoffice.org/.

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Openoffice the microsoft office killer

When I was still a novice computer user, I often forgot to save my data regularly, and as a result spent a lot of time re-writing articles that were lost due to computer malfunctions, power failures, and the like.  Even in those days, most reputable applications had autosave features, but I wasn’t aware of them, or of their importance to my productivity.  Today, I have Word set to save my data every 5 minutes, which means that the worst case scenario is that I must re-write only a bare few minutes of my work.  Time is money, and doing a job twice wastes time.  Instead of learning the hard way, as I did, set up autosave in the following manner, and save yourself a lot of hassles.

1. Open MS Office.
2. Click “Word Options”.
3. Click “Save” (it’s on the left pane).
4. Check the box to save every x minutes.
5. Set the frequency you want the data to be saved.
6. Exit back out to the main interface.

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Post from: MyComputerAid.com Computer support

Setting auto save feature in Word 2003