Word did not seem to be working

  • Article

I wanted to create a document, so I went to Outlook, which I always have running, and type Ctrl-N to create a new Mail message.

From the new mail message, I could type Alt-F, N and then Enter to choose File->New->Blank Document.

(Tools->Options->Mail Format->Message Format->Use Microsoft Word 2003 to edit e-mail messages is checked)

At least, that’s how I could do it in Outlook 2003.

From within Outlook 2007, I haven’t found a similar easy way to start a blank Word document.

In any case, on one machine, I tried starting Word, and nothing happened. Actually, nothing seemed to happen. I tried again, and I also tried from Start Menu->All Programs->Microsoft Office-> Microsoft Office Word 2003.

I noticed that my Windows Task bar showed a Document was created, but I saw no sign of it on my 2048 by 1536 resolution screen.

From Fox, to see your screen resolution, type

?SYSMETRIC(1),SYSMETRIC(2)

So I right clicked on the task bar icon, and got the normal Control box menu with items such as Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize , Close.

So I tried using these options to move the word document onto the screen. Sure enough, if I Maximized, I could see the doc, but if I unmaximized, it disappeared. Then I tried Size/ Move and used the keyboard/mouse to try to manipulate it onto the screen. I could see that the doc was somewhere to the left of my desktop because the mouse would move to the left edge.

Then I brought out my trusty Foxpro, and typed in a few commands:

x=GETOBJECT(,"word.application")

?x.Left,x.Top,x.Width,x.Height

The resulting output showed the problem:

-24191 35 504 323

I don’t know how the Left became so far to the left.

Simple solution:

x.Left=0

and everything was back to normal.

Here are some alternate ways to solve this

  • find where in the registry this preference was stored, and modify it
  • use Spy++ to find the window and send messages to it. (see Spy on your programs)
  • If I had continued my manual interventions, I could have hit the right arrow about 25000 times and fixed it.
  • Any other suggestions? Especially for the