Dave Peterson wrote...
....
I have a short list of things to copy/update when we change pc's at work.
It's not complete, but may help you.
Word/Excel files:
FileName Use
custom.dic personal dictionary
*.acl personal autocorrect list
mssp2_en.exc personal exclusion dictionary
normal.dot default (for new documents) template
*.dot Any other templates you've made
*.xlb personal toolbar
book.xlt defaults for new workbooks
sheet.xlt defaults for new worksheets
personal.xl* personal macros
*.xlt Any other templates you've made
And don't forget any:
Local files (If you don't store on LAN)
(Settings) Directories and other defaults (Tools|Options stuff) ....
Remember to look through hidden folders/files. And if I find multiple files of
the same name, I open excel (say), then make a minor change to that file. Then
search again. Then I can pick out the current version of the file.
....
Someday in the distant future, Microsoft may learn the fundamentals of
sensible file system organization, and some years after that may
actually implement it in Office.
Linux/Unix/BSD systems can be run from CDs or other read-only media as
long as there are read-write media for a swap partition, temporary
files and user files. Only sysadmins can modify system-level
configuration. Any & all user-level configuration is stored in the
user's home directory. Save the user's home directory between updates,
and the user keeps his/her configuration after updating. It's difficult
to grasp just how badly Windows and Office are organized until you see
how easy it is to upgrade other operating systems in which *ALL* user
files are stored on different disk partitions than OS and third party
program files.
The Windows equivalent would be that users other than Administrator and
not in the Administrators group couldn't make ANY changes in any
directory on their C: drives other than in %USERPROFILE%, %HOME%,
%TEMP% and %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Shared Documents (the last being an overly
long counterpart to Linux/Unix/BSD /pub directories). Only sysadmins
should put anything in %PROGRAMFILES% or %SYSTEMROOT%. Letting any user
modify anything in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office is begging
for trouble.
That said, everyone should maintain a batch file for storing
configuration data. Multiple XCOPY commands work pretty well, as would
a commandline Zip file program. IMO, this is one thing for which GUI
tools are vastly inferior.
