Real World Computing
Fixing OOXML
Office 2007 ships with 20 themes, with colour palettes ranging from the muted pastels of Foundry to the vibrant Verve. If your company or organisation employs corporate fonts or colour schemes, you might find it useful to create a custom theme that ensures all your documents follow the corporate standard. You can do this just by creating new sets of theme colours and fonts, selecting a set of effects and then saving the whole lot as a new theme. All these options are in the Themes group of the Page Layout tab in Word or Excel, or the Design tab in PowerPoint. Once you've created a custom Theme, you can use it in any document in any application. You can also distribute the theme, which you'll find in the %appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes folder in a THMX file. Copy your custom theme to other users and they can use it, too. If you use an automated distribution of the Office 2007 software to your users, you can customise the installation to restrict which themes users receive, or else distribute your own theme as the default.
Note that you can't edit the sets of effects in an Office Theme using Office itself - you can only select from the 20 predefined sets - but there's a third-party tool available that will let you do this and more. The Open XML Theme Builder is a project on CodePlex, Microsoft's open-source code repository. Theme Builder is what Microsoft used to create the 20 themes that ship with Office 2007, and all it's done is tidy it up a little and publish it for others to use. You'll find it at www.codeplex.com/openxmlthemebuilder.
Using the Theme Builder, you can open any existing theme or create a new one, alter it and save the result. You can also test the theme, which loads a sample presentation into PowerPoint and applies your theme to it. The presentation contains colour patches that demonstrate the different variations of colour and effects, and slides that show the fonts. So, say you want to add reflection to the moderate effect style, glow to the intense effect or make a more complex gradient for intense fill styles, this tool allows you to do it. It edits the THMX files directly, so you'd be well advised to make copies before you start playing and, while there are some previews of the settings in the application itself, you'll need to test often with PowerPoint and other documents to be certain you're getting the results you want. There's no help, but a little playing with various settings soon gets you into the swing of things.
An older feature of Word that's related to Themes is Style Sets. Each styleset defines the standard styles like Normal, Heading 1 to 9, Strong, Title, Subtitle and more in a different way using different accent colours, margins, indentation, spacing and sizes. You can pick from the list of stylesets in Word 2007 in Home | Styles | Change Styles | Style Sets. The stylesets have names such as Distinctive, Elegant, Fancy and Formal. The Elegant styleset, for instance, makes extensive use of small caps for titles, subtitles and emphasis, muted accent colours and a wide left margin. There are 11 stylesets you can mix and match with the 20 Themes, and you can also mix and match the theme colour sets, font pair and effects separately to produce an array of possible layouts quickly.
Office 2003 SP3 and blocked file types
In September 2007, Microsoft released Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, which contained more than 250 fixes for bugs and changes in functionality in addition to those in the previous two service packs. However, one of the security fixes in SP3 has been troubling some people. After you apply SP3, Office 2003 can no longer open or save some file types: the affected file types being CorelDRAW (CDR), Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro (WK1- WK4, WKS, WJ2, WJ3, FM3), dBASE II (DBF), PowerPoint files older than PowerPoint 97 (PPT, POT, PPS, PPA), Word files older than Word 6 (that is, Word 1 and 2 for Windows, Word 4 and 5 for Mac), and Excel 4 Charts (XLC). Attempting to open or save files of these types will now generate an error message such as: "You are attempting to open a file type that has been blocked by your registry policy setting."
