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Word did not seem to be working

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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

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 12, 2007
    Hi calvin, Whenever I have windows that do show up in the taskbar but are not in the visible area of the desktop I do select 'Move' from the context menu, and press an arrow button. Then the window connects itself to the mouse (off course in the visible range of the desktop). So no pressing the right button numerous times.... Sietse

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2007
    I do Word Excel, Access programming with a little outlook. I would probably set a reference to Word in an Outlook form so I could access Word VBA, or even Word Basic object model, then transfer information. Another way, it go to word, record a mail merge macro into outlook and see what it generates. I built something in Excel once that let you pull outlook contacts into Excel, or send them to an Access table. Or pull data from an Access table and send it to Outlook contacts. All using references in the backend though. So Excel had a reference to both Access and Outlook. It also required SQL and DAO though to communicate with Access.