MacOS – How does Office 2008 for Mac store its Recent items

macosms officepreferences

I don't have access to Office 2008, but require the information for a project I'm working on. I'm mainly interested in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

This is the information I have gathered so far…

The preference file is: ~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.plist

The property keys take the form:

2008\File Aliases\{APP}{n}

2008\MRU Access Date\{APP}{n}

where {APP} represents an Office application, and {n} represents a number starting from 0.

The applications are represented by the following values:

MSWD (Word)

XCEL (Excel)

What value represents PowerPoint?

In the property list I've seen, the numbers represented by {n} range from 0–10 (11 items).

Is 10 the limit? or is this unrestrained?

Finally, I've noticed that Office 2011 does not add its Recent Items to the Apple System menu:

Apple -> Recent Items

Is Office 2008 the same?

Best Answer

At least on my machine, this is what I'm seeing:

PPT3 does appear to be the PowerPoint value
I have lots of items. MSWD0, MSWD1, but then also MSWD99, MSWD109, etc.
Interestingly enough, it looks like PowerPoint adds items to Apple -> Recent Items, but Word and Excel do not. Which seems crazy, but that's what's happening on my machine.

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MacOS – Stop Office for Mac from loading with earlier documents on top of the one I opened

What you want can be accomplished with Automator which comes with OS X.

Open Automator from the Applications folder
Choose New from the File menu or type ⌘-N and choose 'Application'
Search Actions for Launch and drag Launch Application to the workflow on the right
set the app to Word or whatever else you're having the problem with
search Actions for 'Pause' and drag pause to the workflow, set it to however long it takes word to open for you (e.g. 5 seconds)
search Actions for Open Finder Items and add that to the workflow.
Save it as an Application, drag it to your dock and drag docs on to the icon for it when you want them to open on top of the previous Word docs.

N.B. you can also set all documents to open using your freshly created app, so you can just open them as usual, but then a delay will permanently be added to their opening.

Missing Print Options in Office and PowerPoint 2011

I just solved this on my own machine. Very frustrating.

The issue is that the missing section of the print dialog is a "Print Dialog Extension" (PDE). This is loaded from the individual Office apps' plugin directories. The issue is that Office is coded to look for a "PlugIns" directory whereas the directory is actually named "Plugins".

I suggest using a symbolic link to fix this. Presuming you have a default installation of Office then open Terminal, and execute:

cd "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Microsoft PowerPoint.app/Contents/"
ln -s Plugins PlugIns

Relaunch Powerpoint and bask in the delicious print dialog extensions. BTW, you will need to do something similar for the other Office apps.

NOTE: I advise against simply renaming the Plugins directory to PlugIns. It might break something else.

Best Answer

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Missing Print Options in Office and PowerPoint 2011

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