Chapter 14: Microsoft Office XP User Settings

Overview

Microsoft Office XP is extremely flexible and highly customizable. Users can customize Office XP through its settings, custom templates, tools, and much more. For example, an accounting department can create custom templates for expense reports, and IT professionals can create custom dictionaries that contain computer terminology and product names. Users can customize everything from how their toolbars look to the file formats for saving documents. Almost all these settings are in the registry.

IT professionals can customize user settings and distribute standard Office XP configurations to all users. First install Office XP on a sample computer, and then customize the toolbars, settings, templates, dictionaries, and any other options for each program. Run Profile Wizard to create a profile settings file (OPS file) that contains all these settings. If you add the OPS file to a transform (MST file), your customized settings are included when you install Office XP on client computers. Custom Installation Wizard is the tool you use to build MST files. It enables you to customize settings directly in the MST file without an OPS file. You can also use it to set user options and edit registry entries.

Profile Wizard and Custom Installation Wizard are part of the Office XP Resource Kit, which you can find in the ORK folder on any Office XP Enterprise Edition CD. You can also download it from http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork. Because the resource kit's tools are covered comprehensively in the resource kit book, I won't go into detail about them. Instead, I'll focus on how to use these tools to deploy user settings, which are essentially registry settings. And if you're interested in learning about specific Office XP settings, including Office XP policies, and where you find them in the registry, see Part IV, "Appendices."

Tip 

Most of the tools in the Office XP Resource Kit are useful for more than just deploying Office XP. For example, you can deploy settings for any program using Profile Wizard, and you can customize other Microsoft Windows Installer-based applications with Custom Installation Wizard. For that matter, you can use Profile Wizard to customize Windows XP if you're prone to frequent reinstallation.



Microsoft Windows XP Registry Guide
Microsoft Windows XP Registry Guide (Bpg-Other)
ISBN: 0735617880
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 185

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