Rremove the Active Desktop Recovery screen

Never had an awful Microsoft "Active Desktop Recovery" screen after a crash? Here is how to get back your desktop background to normal:

1. Go to Run and type "regedit"
2. Go to –HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Desktop\SafeMode\Components
3. Find the key named "DeskHtmlVersion"
4. Right click on the key and select "Modify"
5. Under "Base", select the "Decimal" button
6. Change the Value data to "0" (zero)
7. Click OK

remove a link to an external reference in Excel

1. On the Data tab, in the Connections group, click Edit Links.

2. In the Source list, click the link that you want to break.

To select multiple linked objects, hold down CTRL, and then click each linked object.

To select all links, press CTRL+A.

3. Click Break Link.

Adjust the levels of the table of content in Micosoft Word

When you create a table of content in Micorsoft Word, the number of levels is guven automatically. If you want to adjust the number of levels presented, say you want to display only 2 levels instead of 3, here is how to proceed:

1) Press "Alt+F9" to switch to code field mode

You will se something like {TOC \o "1-3" \h \z \u}

2) Replace the 3 by 2
3) Press "Alt+F9" again to go back in the normal mode
4) Refresh the table of content

Format different colors in an Excel Chart (same-series data)

By default, within Excel, when you select a single-series chart, all data markers that represent the data points in that series are displayed in the same color. To use different color for each data marker, do the following:

1) Right-click on the data marker (i.e. the bar representing your data)
2) Select "Format Data Series..."

3) Select "Fill", then "Vary Color by Point" and close

The result is that each data marker have now their own color. Excel gives each marker a different color automatically.

4) If you don't like these colors and want to have another color for each specific marker, just do the following:

   a) Left-click on the data marker once --> All data marker will be selected.
   b) Left-click on one specific data marker --> Only this specific data marker will be selected
   c) Right-click on the marker and select "Format Data Point" --> "Fill" --> "Solid Fill" --> select your color

Unlock the Form protection of Word documents

In the case you want to edit a word document that has been created using forms and these forms are locked-down, here are alternatives to bypass thi protection:

With Word versions previous to 2007, it was this easy:
1) Open the word document
2) Hit Shift+Alt+F11 to open the Script Editor
3) Search for the "Password: field (using Ctl+F)
4) Replace the 8 characters by 00000000
5) Save the file from the script editor and you're done

With Word 2007 and later versions, here is another tric
1) Open a new blank document in word
2) Click Insert --> Object --> Text from file
3) You can now edit the text
3) Save the document

Finally here is another option:
1) Open the file in Word
2) Save the document in HTML format
3) Open the html document with IE
4) Click on View --> Source - This will open a windows with a view similar to the Script Editor
5) Search for the "Password: field (using Ctl+F)
6) Replace the 8 characters by 00000000
7) Save the file and you're done

How to activate the automatic calculation in Excel

When Excel does not update the result of a formula after modifying the data, you need to do one of the following ticks:

1) press F9 to refresh the results

2) open File --> Options --> Formulas and go to Calculations and select "Automatic" (Excel 2010)

How to change the regional keyboard input

Sometime, my computer is changing the keyboard settings (supposedly after hitting a sequence of keys without intent) and I am ending up with strange characters showing up when I am typing, either on Internet Explorer or in a Microsoft office document. For example, " instead of @, É instead of ?, etc...

Reverting to the normal input is tricky but here is the solution (here for Windows Vista):

- Go to the Control panel

- Open the Clock, Language, and Region

- Open the Regional and Language Options

- Select Keyboards and languages

- Click on "Change keyboard"

- Open the tab "Advanced Key Settings"

- Now you can select shortcut to switch between keyboard settings, such as Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2 by selecting the language and clicking on "Change Key Sequence"

- Click Apply or OK and you're done!!

If you're locked in a strange language, you just have to hit the shortcut (Ctrl+1 or Ctrl+2) to come back to the original language...