Problem with Excel

[Sharon Burton]

MS has a nasty habit of just doing stuff without telling us. I suspect it's
something they broke to try to get us to update.

Since I've worked with Vista and Office 2007 on my work laptop, I'm standing
firm on my Office 2000 and XP for my home machine. They works and I prefer
to be able to find things! And Vista is a freaking nightmare OS. Good lord.
Not since a laptop came with Windows ME have I hated an OS this much. The IT
guy swapped it out this weekend for me and put XP and Office 2003 on
instead. I may have a functional laptop again this week.

But what Al is describing is exactly what's happening with me. I can drag
the file and drop it on my application after the application opens. But I
can't get the file to both open the application AND open itself.

I seriously can't be bothered to spend any time disconnecting from the 'net,
rebooting, disabling my anti-spyware and anti-virus stuff, to see if that
impacts it. I'll deal with the Alt+tab and an extra double-click. I have a
puppy that could be hugged instead.

sharon

Sharon Burton
CEO, Anthrobytes Consulting
951-369-8590
www.anthrobytes.com


-----Original Message-----
From: AL Geist [mailto:al.geist at geistassociates.com]
Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2007 9:20 AM
To: sharon at anthrobytes.com; 'Dana Worley (webmail)';
techwr-l at lists.techwr-l.com
Subject: RE: Problem with Excel



Sharon Burton wrote:

Subject: RE: Problem with Excel

>I've noticed my desktop computer (XP and Office 2000) has started doing
this  same thing. Seemed to have started about 2 weeks ago.<

This is just about the same time I noticed the problem.

>I go to Windows Explorer, find the Word or Excel file I want (the file
shows the correct association and icon), double-click it to open. The
correct  application opens but the file is not opened. If I leave the
application open, go back to Explorer and double-click the file again, NOW
it opens in the application.<

My problem hasn't show up with Word yet. However, if I open the application,
then I can either double click the file in Explorer and it loads into the
application, or I can drag-and-drop it into the application and it loads. If
I double click the file without the application loaded, the application
opens, but it does not load the file.

>I find it annoying but not a deal breaker. Perhaps MS patched us and this
is the result? I can see a security reason - this prevents a script from
opening a bad file and having the bad file run all by itself.<


It might be a security issue, but if the "update" affects how users access
programs, then Microsoft should at least tell us. Personally, I think it was
a bug in one of their patches and it will remain a bug because it's a way to
move people from 2000 and XP to the memory hog they call Vista.


Al Geist