Zembian

Problem

Looking after a legacy document production application that uses Microsoft Word mail merge to produce documents, I came across a problem with Word 2003 taking a long time (1 minute plus) to open the .dot templates.

After much investigation the following factors were involved :

1) The SQLSecurityCheck registry key needed to be set to DWORD 0.

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Options\SQLSecurityCheck

and

2) The .dot templates you are using were originally created in a version of Word before the SQLSecurityCheck flag was added. That is Microsoft Word 6.0, Word 95, Word 97 and Word 2000.

Solution

The easy solution is to update all legacy templates to your current version of Word. I have done this on Microsoft Word 2003 and cannot say if Word 2007 has a similar feature (yet).

1) Start Word. Click File > New. Click "On my computer" under Templates.

2) Click "Other Documents" tab and select the batch conversion wizard. If the batch conversion wizard does not appear then Microsoft have provided instructions on installing it here.

3) Once the wizard marco code runs select "Convert from Word to another format".

Note : I tried the "Convert from another format to Word" route and ended up with a load of Word 2003 .doc documents, not .dot templates.

4) Set the Source Folder, which is the original old templates location. Set the Destination Folder for the new Word 2003 templates. I recommend these are different directories.

5) In the drop down list for type manually enter "*.dot"  and click Select All.

6) The Available panel will now be empty and all of the .dot templates will appear in the To Convert panel. Click Next to proceed.

7) Click Finish and the batch conversion will beign to convert the selected templates to Microsoft Word 2003 format.

Problem

The GMail help entry shows that label colouring is available but the feature was not showing up. How do you get colour labels to show in the first place ?

GMail help entry : Changing label colors

Solution

By chance I found changing the Google Mail language settings enabled colour labels.

1) Log into Google Mail and  click settings near the top right of the page.

2) Check the language setting, from the image below you can see I was using English (UK).

3) Change the language setting to English (US), the image below shows an example.

4) Go back to your mail and you can now change label colours.