The Old New Thing

When I double-click an Excel spreadsheet, Excel opens but the document doesn’t

July 30, 2008 Jul 30, 2008 07/30/08

Raymond Chen

Sometime last year, we got a report from a customer that whenever he double-clicks an Excel spreadsheet, Excel starts up, but the document isn't loaded. Instead, he gets an error message saying that document could not be found. He has to go to the Open dialog and open the spreadsheet manually. This report was routed to the shell team, since it...

Windows could not properly load the XYZ keyboard layout

July 22, 2008 Jul 22, 2008 07/22/08

Raymond Chen

In my rôle as the family technical support department, I get to poke around without really knowing what I'm doing and hope to stumble across a solution. Sometimes I succeed; sometimes I fail. Today, I'm documenting one of my successes in the hope that it might come in handy for you, the technical support department for your family. (...

Windows Vista changed the Alt+Tab order slightly

July 1, 2008 Jul 1, 2008 07/1/08

Raymond Chen

For decades, the Alt+Tab order was the same as the Z-order, but that changes in Windows Vista if you use the enhanced Alt+Tab feature known as Flip, which is on by default on most systems. There are three types of interactive task switching in Windows Vista: Classic Alt+Tab continues to show the icons in Z-order order, but the developer ...

You don't need that 90 byte whereis program any more

June 30, 2008 Jun 30, 2008 06/30/08

Raymond Chen

Yes, you can write a whereis program in 90 bytes but Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista both come with a version of , so you don't even need the batch file any more...

Why has my clipboard stopped working?

June 4, 2008 Jun 4, 2008 06/4/08

Raymond Chen

You may be minding your own business and discover that your clipboard has stopped working. You try to copy something to the clipboard, and it's not there. You try to paste something from the clipboard, and nothing comes out. What's going on? The clipboard is a shared resource. (More specifically, shared among programs that run on the same ...

Build a slide show out of search results

May 15, 2008 May 15, 2008 05/15/08

Raymond Chen

My colleague David Washington discovered how you can combine the Sidebar slide show gadget with search folders to end up with a slide show that is built out of search results. Pretty neat...

The double-click time tells the window manager how good your reflexes are

April 23, 2008 Apr 23, 2008 04/23/08

Raymond Chen

The double-click time is sort of the dialog unit of time. It's used as the basis for many user interface time values that don't have their own custom setting. Here are just a few examples, along with the values you get if you leave the double-click time at its default of 500ms: If you go into the mouse control panel and speed up your double...

One-line batch script to delete empty directories

April 17, 2008 Apr 17, 2008 04/17/08

Raymond Chen

You don't need a whole 260KB program to do it. This batch file does the trick just fine: I call it . This is the long-forgotten follow-up to Performing an operation in each subdirectory of a directory tree from batch. We're using the same technique as in that article, but pumping the result through "" to reverse the order of the ...

How do I force the ECHO command to echo?

April 3, 2008 Apr 3, 2008 04/3/08

Raymond Chen

The built-in command, how much simpler could it get? It takes whatever you put on the command line and prints it. And yet it's not that simple. For example, the must be careful not to compress whitespace, because people will write and when you execute this, the result had better be and not But what if you want to echo a blank ...

2008 Q1 link clearance: Microsoft blogger edition

March 31, 2008 Mar 31, 2008 03/31/08

Raymond Chen

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